why is defragging not really a thing anymore?

Question

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

Answer 1

There’s so many wrong answers in this thread it’s insane.

The simple answer is that modern SSDs **do not** need defragmentation since they don’t have physical disks and disk heads that have a delay when moving between sectors to lookup data (this is why SSDs feel instantaneous and snappy, they always know where to read data from). Defragmenting an SSD actually lowers its lifespan since the cells have a limited write/rewrite capacity.

Modern OS and filesystems do perform maintenance on SSDs via a TRIM command, which tells the SSD what cells can be erased (deleting a file doesn’t actually delete it, it’s just marked as unused until trimmed). The the SSD’s controller keeps track of these changes and writes new data in a way that evenly wears the cells.

Answer 2

There’s so many wrong answers in this thread it’s insane.

The simple answer is that modern SSDs **do not** need defragmentation since they don’t have physical disks and disk heads that have a delay when moving between sectors to lookup data (this is why SSDs feel instantaneous and snappy, they always know where to read data from). Defragmenting an SSD actually lowers its lifespan since the cells have a limited write/rewrite capacity.

Modern OS and filesystems do perform maintenance on SSDs via a TRIM command, which tells the SSD what cells can be erased (deleting a file doesn’t actually delete it, it’s just marked as unused until trimmed). The the SSD’s controller keeps track of these changes and writes new data in a way that evenly wears the cells.