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
Defragging was needed as early filesystems wrote data at a convenient free space and spread it to multiple locations if that first free space was not sufficient for the total amount of data.
Later systems had more memory caches and better algorithms to make a better guess at how much data would be written. Knowing the total amount of data, the filesystem could figure out a much more suitable location, already decreasing fragmentation and therefor the need for defragmentation.
Today’s filesystems, actually still do defragmentation, but often it is done automatically in the background.
It is part of several different housekeeping chores labeled as *datascrubbing*, so the term *defragmentation* is not often used anymore.
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
Defragging was needed as early filesystems wrote data at a convenient free space and spread it to multiple locations if that first free space was not sufficient for the total amount of data.
Later systems had more memory caches and better algorithms to make a better guess at how much data would be written. Knowing the total amount of data, the filesystem could figure out a much more suitable location, already decreasing fragmentation and therefor the need for defragmentation.
Today’s filesystems, actually still do defragmentation, but often it is done automatically in the background.
It is part of several different housekeeping chores labeled as *datascrubbing*, so the term *defragmentation* is not often used anymore.
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