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
**What does defragmentation do**
Imagine you have 3 Programs installed, each having multiple files that all need to be accessed. Because the HDD writes the data on a platter physically, it can read things faster if they are close together. Perfect arrangement would be:
|AAAAABBBBBBCCCCCC..|
(for files belonging to program A B and C)
now if you install and uninstall programs regularly you end up in this configuration before installing program C:
|AAAAA….BBBBBB….|
installing program C would now lead to:
|AAAAACCCCBBBBBCC..|
In this configuration your HDD need to move its write-head/the physical disk more for loading all C-Files than in the optimal layout thus making the access slower.
Defragmentation reorders the “Fragmented” files that belong together to the optimal arrangement.
**Why its not needed with SSDs (and other flash memory)**
SSDs dont have any moving parts, accessing any part of the disk is basically the same speed. There would be no benefit in reordering the data.
An SSD does other things that are more relevant to it than HDDs. Eg. writing data to areas, that have the least number of writes to evenly distribute the wear and prolong the lifetime of the SSD, those things are (mostly) done automatically within the SSD though.
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
**What does defragmentation do**
Imagine you have 3 Programs installed, each having multiple files that all need to be accessed. Because the HDD writes the data on a platter physically, it can read things faster if they are close together. Perfect arrangement would be:
|AAAAABBBBBBCCCCCC..|
(for files belonging to program A B and C)
now if you install and uninstall programs regularly you end up in this configuration before installing program C:
|AAAAA….BBBBBB….|
installing program C would now lead to:
|AAAAACCCCBBBBBCC..|
In this configuration your HDD need to move its write-head/the physical disk more for loading all C-Files than in the optimal layout thus making the access slower.
Defragmentation reorders the “Fragmented” files that belong together to the optimal arrangement.
**Why its not needed with SSDs (and other flash memory)**
SSDs dont have any moving parts, accessing any part of the disk is basically the same speed. There would be no benefit in reordering the data.
An SSD does other things that are more relevant to it than HDDs. Eg. writing data to areas, that have the least number of writes to evenly distribute the wear and prolong the lifetime of the SSD, those things are (mostly) done automatically within the SSD though.
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