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
Imagine you want to high-five your friend while he’s riding a carousel – you can stand in one place and slap his hand each time he comes around. If you want to deliver 5 slaps, you have to wait for him to come around 5 times. If you want to deliver 100 slaps… you are gonna be waiting a while.
Now imagine a giant carousel with multiple rows of horses that 100 people can ride (this is effectively a Hard Disk Platter), and you’ve got 20 friends you want to high-five (your data stored on the platter). If you know where they are, and can reach far and fast enough, you can still stand in one place and slap them as they go by (and you’ve just become a hard disk’s read head). You’re still limited to one slap per rotation though, so if you want to deliver slaps faster, you’re going to have to speed up the carousel (higher end hard disk drives can spin at 15,000 RPM!).
You can see how it becomes a lot of work to slap each of your friends (by which I mean read your data), and it only gets to be even more work when drives have multiple platters – a stack of multiple carousels all spinning at the same time and you want to slap people on each one – wouldn’t it be easier if you could organize your friends to sit next to each other so you could just hold your hand out once or twice and let them get you as they go by?
This is effectively what defragging does. It repositions the data to be more optimally accessed, and back when all of us were suffering on these spinning hard disk drives every day, it was necessary to perform regularly in order to keep the computer feeing responsive – otherwise just like watching your friend on the far side of the carousel, you were stuck waiting.
There are many, many other improvements that have happened, but what as arguably made the largest difference is drive technology. Flash media that’s used in solid state drives means there’s no more “waiting for the carousel to come around again,” you can effectively reach and slap each and every one of your friends all at the same time, regardless of how spread out (fragmented) they are, and this means there’s no longer a need to re-organize the data (or defragment) all the time.
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
Imagine you want to high-five your friend while he’s riding a carousel – you can stand in one place and slap his hand each time he comes around. If you want to deliver 5 slaps, you have to wait for him to come around 5 times. If you want to deliver 100 slaps… you are gonna be waiting a while.
Now imagine a giant carousel with multiple rows of horses that 100 people can ride (this is effectively a Hard Disk Platter), and you’ve got 20 friends you want to high-five (your data stored on the platter). If you know where they are, and can reach far and fast enough, you can still stand in one place and slap them as they go by (and you’ve just become a hard disk’s read head). You’re still limited to one slap per rotation though, so if you want to deliver slaps faster, you’re going to have to speed up the carousel (higher end hard disk drives can spin at 15,000 RPM!).
You can see how it becomes a lot of work to slap each of your friends (by which I mean read your data), and it only gets to be even more work when drives have multiple platters – a stack of multiple carousels all spinning at the same time and you want to slap people on each one – wouldn’t it be easier if you could organize your friends to sit next to each other so you could just hold your hand out once or twice and let them get you as they go by?
This is effectively what defragging does. It repositions the data to be more optimally accessed, and back when all of us were suffering on these spinning hard disk drives every day, it was necessary to perform regularly in order to keep the computer feeing responsive – otherwise just like watching your friend on the far side of the carousel, you were stuck waiting.
There are many, many other improvements that have happened, but what as arguably made the largest difference is drive technology. Flash media that’s used in solid state drives means there’s no more “waiting for the carousel to come around again,” you can effectively reach and slap each and every one of your friends all at the same time, regardless of how spread out (fragmented) they are, and this means there’s no longer a need to re-organize the data (or defragment) all the time.
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