I was born in 1973, got my first computer in 1994, defragging was part of regular maintenance. I can’t remember the last time I defragged anything, even though I have several devices with hard drives, including a Windows laptop. Has storage technology changed so much that defragging isn’t necessary anymore? Is it even possible to defrag a smart phone hard drive?
edit to add: I apologize for posting this same question several times, I was getting an error message every time I hit “post”… but from looking around, it seems I’m not the only one having this problem today.
In: 821
I believe Defragmentation was more important on older hard drives with spinning disks than it is in the more modern super fast flash drives. OS’s are also better at the way they store data to avoid needing to defrag.
Solid state storage has changed things a lot. Previously data was stored in a particlar position on a disc and defragging tried to put that data in logical places so that the machine didn’t have to work so hard to read and write it.
Solid state drives have no moving parts and so the seek time is a small fraction of a hard drive’s. The real problem is that each bit on a solid state drive has only a limited number of writes and rewrites, so the drive is trying to strategically spread the use out over all the storage space.
So a defrag not only makes little real sense in a data organization way, but it can potentially lower the life of the drive by putting it through un-necessary write and rewrite cycles.
Super short over simplified answer, traditional hard drives stored data on platters. When the drive is squeezing part of a game file in-between your cat pictures, it’s not written necessarily written in the most optimal location and can cause delays while seeking to that point.
SSDs it doesn’t matter because the table is kept exactly where each file is and doesn’t need to find it on a spinning platter at 5k+ rpm
In addition to the HDD/SSD split, the older drive formatting types like FAT needed to be defragged. The more modern ones like NTFS and XFS are smarter in how to allocate data and, in conjunction with better operating systems, do not need to be defragged much, if at all.
Modenr Storage is now mostly done with solid state drives whihc due to how they operate make defragging unnecessary(and even harmful since SSD flash cells have a rated number of writes). insteadd what SSDs have is a process Called TRIM which is for msot part handled automatically by the OS.
for the few situations where HDDs are still used defragging is still doable but hardly necessary since most of these drives are just for storage now.
Fragmentation on a hard disk still creates the same issues with slowed speeds as it did in the past. Modern disks are so much faster that a moderate level of fragmentation might not be noticed. Full defragmentation of a multi-terabyte disk would take too long and cause some wear on it. Hard disks are usually used for large multimedia files like video and music, which are copied in large blocks and rarely rewritten, and their level of fragmentation is therefore low.
Portable computers and many desktops today include solid-state Flash Memory instead of a hard disk. Data allocation on it is managed internally with intent to spread wear and allow speeds utilizing multiple chips. Flash memory can be written to a limited number of times before they fail. Defragmenting this storage device would not improve performance.
Because SSDs rule the world and they couldn’t care less how ridiculously dispersed the individual bits are for a file, they can access them so stupidly fast it no longer matters. Moving HDDs can’t access data that’s spread out all that quickly, and it also puts wear on the disk to move around that much searching, so it was, and still is for HDDs, recommended to defrag regularly.
* Bigger disks
* Better filesystems
* SSD vs. HDD
* Larger caches
Bigger disks: Most folks don’t spend much time with their disk at 90% capacity anymore, so the filesystem doesn’t have to split files up as much to find room for them.
Better filesystems: The OS engineers have come up with cleverer ways to organize files on disk, which produce less fragmentation even under storage pressure.
SSD vs. HDD: The geometry of storage devices is different, and SSDs are also just plain faster.
Larger caches: Your machine has lots of RAM, and your OS can use a lot of it to prefetch and cache disk contents, so you don’t notice the effects of slightly slower disk access due to fragmentation.
Most forms of storage support fragmentation. It splits up a large file into smaller pieces to fit between other things. Kind of like a whole Encyclopedia Britannica with 36 volumes doesn’t fit in your bookshelf so to save time you just put each volume where it fits. By keeping a record of where you put them you can find them nearly as easily.
For HDDs (hard disk drives) they use a spinning piece of metal like the bookshelf in this metaphor. It takes time for it to spin and computers are incredibly fast so this delay slows everything down. To minimize this you can rearrange the bookshelf or defragment, moving things around to allow your Encyclopedia Britannica to all fit on one shelf, making loading it faster.
Modern computers tend to use SSDs (solid state disks) which are all electrical and this don’t need to spin. That means that fragmentation doesn’t matter.
Additionally wear is important. HDD can survive more write cycles (changing the value stored) than the lifetime of the device. In constrast SSDs could easily wear out during the lifetime. To help with this the SSD spreads out where it writes things, defragmentation would increase writes and also force those writes to be on particular locations both of which reduce the lifetime of the drive.
Like everyone else is saying, SSDs don’t need to be defragmented remotely as often as old HDDs did.
Also – since Windows Vista, Windows has contained tools to slowly and passively defragment in the background when needed. The tech has been slowly refined over versions and, as of Win10, even if you use exclusively old HDDs, you’re unlikely to ever need to manually defragment.
I was born in 1973, got my first computer in 1994, defragging was part of regular maintenance. I can’t remember the last time I defragged anything, even though I have several devices with hard drives, including a Windows laptop. Has storage technology changed so much that defragging isn’t necessary anymore? Is it even possible to defrag a smart phone hard drive?
edit to add: I apologize for posting this same question several times, I was getting an error message every time I hit “post”… but from looking around, it seems I’m not the only one having this problem today.
In: 821
I believe Defragmentation was more important on older hard drives with spinning disks than it is in the more modern super fast flash drives. OS’s are also better at the way they store data to avoid needing to defrag.
Solid state storage has changed things a lot. Previously data was stored in a particlar position on a disc and defragging tried to put that data in logical places so that the machine didn’t have to work so hard to read and write it.
Solid state drives have no moving parts and so the seek time is a small fraction of a hard drive’s. The real problem is that each bit on a solid state drive has only a limited number of writes and rewrites, so the drive is trying to strategically spread the use out over all the storage space.
So a defrag not only makes little real sense in a data organization way, but it can potentially lower the life of the drive by putting it through un-necessary write and rewrite cycles.
Super short over simplified answer, traditional hard drives stored data on platters. When the drive is squeezing part of a game file in-between your cat pictures, it’s not written necessarily written in the most optimal location and can cause delays while seeking to that point.
SSDs it doesn’t matter because the table is kept exactly where each file is and doesn’t need to find it on a spinning platter at 5k+ rpm
In addition to the HDD/SSD split, the older drive formatting types like FAT needed to be defragged. The more modern ones like NTFS and XFS are smarter in how to allocate data and, in conjunction with better operating systems, do not need to be defragged much, if at all.
Modenr Storage is now mostly done with solid state drives whihc due to how they operate make defragging unnecessary(and even harmful since SSD flash cells have a rated number of writes). insteadd what SSDs have is a process Called TRIM which is for msot part handled automatically by the OS.
for the few situations where HDDs are still used defragging is still doable but hardly necessary since most of these drives are just for storage now.
Fragmentation on a hard disk still creates the same issues with slowed speeds as it did in the past. Modern disks are so much faster that a moderate level of fragmentation might not be noticed. Full defragmentation of a multi-terabyte disk would take too long and cause some wear on it. Hard disks are usually used for large multimedia files like video and music, which are copied in large blocks and rarely rewritten, and their level of fragmentation is therefore low.
Portable computers and many desktops today include solid-state Flash Memory instead of a hard disk. Data allocation on it is managed internally with intent to spread wear and allow speeds utilizing multiple chips. Flash memory can be written to a limited number of times before they fail. Defragmenting this storage device would not improve performance.
Because SSDs rule the world and they couldn’t care less how ridiculously dispersed the individual bits are for a file, they can access them so stupidly fast it no longer matters. Moving HDDs can’t access data that’s spread out all that quickly, and it also puts wear on the disk to move around that much searching, so it was, and still is for HDDs, recommended to defrag regularly.
* Bigger disks
* Better filesystems
* SSD vs. HDD
* Larger caches
Bigger disks: Most folks don’t spend much time with their disk at 90% capacity anymore, so the filesystem doesn’t have to split files up as much to find room for them.
Better filesystems: The OS engineers have come up with cleverer ways to organize files on disk, which produce less fragmentation even under storage pressure.
SSD vs. HDD: The geometry of storage devices is different, and SSDs are also just plain faster.
Larger caches: Your machine has lots of RAM, and your OS can use a lot of it to prefetch and cache disk contents, so you don’t notice the effects of slightly slower disk access due to fragmentation.
Most forms of storage support fragmentation. It splits up a large file into smaller pieces to fit between other things. Kind of like a whole Encyclopedia Britannica with 36 volumes doesn’t fit in your bookshelf so to save time you just put each volume where it fits. By keeping a record of where you put them you can find them nearly as easily.
For HDDs (hard disk drives) they use a spinning piece of metal like the bookshelf in this metaphor. It takes time for it to spin and computers are incredibly fast so this delay slows everything down. To minimize this you can rearrange the bookshelf or defragment, moving things around to allow your Encyclopedia Britannica to all fit on one shelf, making loading it faster.
Modern computers tend to use SSDs (solid state disks) which are all electrical and this don’t need to spin. That means that fragmentation doesn’t matter.
Additionally wear is important. HDD can survive more write cycles (changing the value stored) than the lifetime of the device. In constrast SSDs could easily wear out during the lifetime. To help with this the SSD spreads out where it writes things, defragmentation would increase writes and also force those writes to be on particular locations both of which reduce the lifetime of the drive.
Like everyone else is saying, SSDs don’t need to be defragmented remotely as often as old HDDs did.
Also – since Windows Vista, Windows has contained tools to slowly and passively defragment in the background when needed. The tech has been slowly refined over versions and, as of Win10, even if you use exclusively old HDDs, you’re unlikely to ever need to manually defragment.
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