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
The reason fragmentation is important to eliminate on an older spindle disk is the way the data is written and read. The disk inside a hard disk drive is literally a round plate, and data is written by a movable magnetic head to magnetic rings along the disk. An ideal unfragmented file on a rotating HDD spindle would have all the bits written along a single ring or series of adjacent rings so that it literally takes less time for the moving head to travel over the surface of the disk to read the data. You can kind of think of it like a line of vehicles offloading at the airport, you have 3 busses of kids to offload, but only a couple vehicles can offload at the same time. If all 3 busses are right in line, it goes quicker than if they are all spaced out so that you have to wait between offloads. A heavily fragmented file on a rotational Hard disk drive is just like that, data pieces may be all over the disk, some on the inner rings, some outer, or some on the same ring but spaced far apart. Defragmentation literally moves smaller data chunks out from between larger data that would benefit from being closer and more compact to speed up the read and write process. Its why you need a certain amount of free space to defragment a disk.
With a solid state Drive, there aren’t any moving parts, just different memory cells. It is literally no faster to access any of the memory cells in the array than any other cell, so there is no benefit to having your data physically congruent like with a rotational HDD. The SSD can just read or write from any point in the array as fast as its base speed will let it, so it doesn’t care if the file is split all over. What a SSD really does care about though is the number of reads and writes of those cells over time, since they literally wear out. Defragmentation adds needless reads and writes to those cells, and does absolutely nothing for performance, so it actually adds a small but meaningful amount to accelerating the death of a SSD if you regularly defrag it. That being said, most SSD’s in home computers will never actually manage to wear out a cell in the drive before replacing it with a bigger newer faster one, but it is a concern.
So, TLDR: Spinning rotational hard drive spindles need data bits close together in a row to make it faster to read and write, SSD doesn’t care and excess reading and writing will actually kill the drive faster so Defrag = bad on a SSD.
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
The reason fragmentation is important to eliminate on an older spindle disk is the way the data is written and read. The disk inside a hard disk drive is literally a round plate, and data is written by a movable magnetic head to magnetic rings along the disk. An ideal unfragmented file on a rotating HDD spindle would have all the bits written along a single ring or series of adjacent rings so that it literally takes less time for the moving head to travel over the surface of the disk to read the data. You can kind of think of it like a line of vehicles offloading at the airport, you have 3 busses of kids to offload, but only a couple vehicles can offload at the same time. If all 3 busses are right in line, it goes quicker than if they are all spaced out so that you have to wait between offloads. A heavily fragmented file on a rotational Hard disk drive is just like that, data pieces may be all over the disk, some on the inner rings, some outer, or some on the same ring but spaced far apart. Defragmentation literally moves smaller data chunks out from between larger data that would benefit from being closer and more compact to speed up the read and write process. Its why you need a certain amount of free space to defragment a disk.
With a solid state Drive, there aren’t any moving parts, just different memory cells. It is literally no faster to access any of the memory cells in the array than any other cell, so there is no benefit to having your data physically congruent like with a rotational HDD. The SSD can just read or write from any point in the array as fast as its base speed will let it, so it doesn’t care if the file is split all over. What a SSD really does care about though is the number of reads and writes of those cells over time, since they literally wear out. Defragmentation adds needless reads and writes to those cells, and does absolutely nothing for performance, so it actually adds a small but meaningful amount to accelerating the death of a SSD if you regularly defrag it. That being said, most SSD’s in home computers will never actually manage to wear out a cell in the drive before replacing it with a bigger newer faster one, but it is a concern.
So, TLDR: Spinning rotational hard drive spindles need data bits close together in a row to make it faster to read and write, SSD doesn’t care and excess reading and writing will actually kill the drive faster so Defrag = bad on a SSD.
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