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

Aside from SSDs, bigger drives is really the answer here.

Back in the day when you would regularly use most of your hard drive space and un/reinstall things to make room. Data that should have been contiguous was frequently fragmented and slotted in anywhere they would fit. HDD seeking was a high latency operation, so reading fragmented data from a disk was slow, and because people deleted things to make room for new stuff the problem got progressively worse until you needed to do something about it (defrag). FAT in particular was pretty aggressive about fragmenting files to efficiently use limited space, so it was particularly prone to this issue.

With a much larger drive you didn’t need to worry about it, because there were big ol’ blocks empty blocks that file systems could write new stuff to, so it didn’t get as fragmented. People didn’t have to delete stuff (leaving weird sized holes) to make room often, and when they did they usually deleted larger files which left bigger gaps, which caused less fragmentation. Modern file systems prioritised access speed over disk space utilisation which also helped, and then SSDs finally came in and rendered the whole idea of defragmentation redundant.

Answer 2

Aside from SSDs, bigger drives is really the answer here.

Back in the day when you would regularly use most of your hard drive space and un/reinstall things to make room. Data that should have been contiguous was frequently fragmented and slotted in anywhere they would fit. HDD seeking was a high latency operation, so reading fragmented data from a disk was slow, and because people deleted things to make room for new stuff the problem got progressively worse until you needed to do something about it (defrag). FAT in particular was pretty aggressive about fragmenting files to efficiently use limited space, so it was particularly prone to this issue.

With a much larger drive you didn’t need to worry about it, because there were big ol’ blocks empty blocks that file systems could write new stuff to, so it didn’t get as fragmented. People didn’t have to delete stuff (leaving weird sized holes) to make room often, and when they did they usually deleted larger files which left bigger gaps, which caused less fragmentation. Modern file systems prioritised access speed over disk space utilisation which also helped, and then SSDs finally came in and rendered the whole idea of defragmentation redundant.