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
Originally we used Hard Drives which you can think of as small little record players.
When you save your first few files they are laid down on the record like the first tracks of your LP. Eventually you might fill up your record, and decide to delete a few files to make room for your new game. So you pick a few files that you are no longer using and remove them. Unfortunately statistically these files that you removed are unlikely to be sequential tracks on the record. So when you install your new game, you end up putting part of the game on the first open track until that fills up, and then jump to the next open track until you have used up the space that you needed.
The issue now is that you can’t speed up the record player as it is always running at the max speed that it can. So as you load your game, you have to load each part of the file, and then skip to the next spot etc etc, which is much slower than just reading the whole thing as a single uninterrupted track.
Defragging is just the process of moving data around on the physical record to make as many fragmented tracks, sequential and unbroken again, hence defragmenting.
Modern computers are fast enough now that they can do this process either in the background or as you are accessing the data so it is not a monolithic event that you do once in a while. Also with SSDs you no longer have long seek and load times as data can be accessed from anywhere on the device at the same rate, so its not really a problem.
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
Originally we used Hard Drives which you can think of as small little record players.
When you save your first few files they are laid down on the record like the first tracks of your LP. Eventually you might fill up your record, and decide to delete a few files to make room for your new game. So you pick a few files that you are no longer using and remove them. Unfortunately statistically these files that you removed are unlikely to be sequential tracks on the record. So when you install your new game, you end up putting part of the game on the first open track until that fills up, and then jump to the next open track until you have used up the space that you needed.
The issue now is that you can’t speed up the record player as it is always running at the max speed that it can. So as you load your game, you have to load each part of the file, and then skip to the next spot etc etc, which is much slower than just reading the whole thing as a single uninterrupted track.
Defragging is just the process of moving data around on the physical record to make as many fragmented tracks, sequential and unbroken again, hence defragmenting.
Modern computers are fast enough now that they can do this process either in the background or as you are accessing the data so it is not a monolithic event that you do once in a while. Also with SSDs you no longer have long seek and load times as data can be accessed from anywhere on the device at the same rate, so its not really a problem.
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