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

Windows has, since at least version 7, automatically defragged hard disks. SSDs don’t need to be defragged because they don’t rely on a spinning disk where the physical distance between chunks of data can have a significant impact on load time.
As to why Linux/Unix/Mac don’t generally need to be defragged – the filesystems distribute files much more sparsely across the disks than NTFS. FAT type filesystems simply stacked the files on top of each other so when a file was updated it would have to be continued outside of its original location.

Answer 2

Windows has, since at least version 7, automatically defragged hard disks. SSDs don’t need to be defragged because they don’t rely on a spinning disk where the physical distance between chunks of data can have a significant impact on load time.
As to why Linux/Unix/Mac don’t generally need to be defragged – the filesystems distribute files much more sparsely across the disks than NTFS. FAT type filesystems simply stacked the files on top of each other so when a file was updated it would have to be continued outside of its original location.