Why do computers start to slow down over time?
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Another cause that I haven’t seen anyone mention is fragmentation. Hard drives (drives with a spinning platter as opposed to SSDs) can fetch data much faster if it’s contiguous rather than scattered all around the disk. Starting with an empty drive files will be written out nicely, but the longer you use the drive, the more files will end up scattered across the disk in non-contiguous chunks. This means the average speed at which you can read files from your drive will decrease over time.
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