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
Imagine you have to put all the data I give you in crates, as efficiently as possible, and you NEVER get more crates to put things in.
Now imagine that the crates can ONLY hold papers in them up to the top of the crate.
Now I give you – over a course of years – huge amounts of folders and papers to put in those crates but all for different projects.
At first, you’ll want to put one set of folders in each crate, to keep them all together. That works fine. But eventually all the crates will have something in.
At some point, you’re going to have to split a folder and put half of it in one crate and half in another because you have no more empty crates and moving things between crates is slow and expensive (on old disks).
That means that when I ask for that particular folder back, you’re going to need to find two, maybe several, maybe HUNDREDS of crates in order to get all the folder pieces back together for it. That will take you far longer than just handing me a complete folder out of a single crate.
As time goes by, I might not need some folders any more and ask you to destroy them. But they might be spread out among several crates, so you have to delete all the parts. That leaves gaps in some crates at the beginning of your pile of crates, gaps in some crates at the end, and maybe full crates in between. Now when I give you another folder you have to split that folder into parts and put some in the first crates, and then run to the other end and put the rest in the last crates.
At some point, it begins to affect how fast you can find things, and it’s not logical or sensible. So you might decide one day to go through all the crates, put all the folders that are to do with the same project together, keep them all in crates that are next to each other, sort them all into order so you can find things easily again.
That’s defragging. Because of the technical limitations of machines and storage, you didn’t want to make the file reading/writing process any more complicated than necessary as it would slow the machine down when you were using it. So you did things “quickly” when you were given or asked for data even if that wasn’t sensible, and you never had time to “tidy up”. Which meant that eventually the mess built up and you HAD to defrag.
Modern OS simply do things more sensibly, because they have the processing and storage power to do so. And modern drives (SSD and NVMe) literally don’t care how far apart files are. They can get to a crate next to you just as quickly as a crate on the very end of the disk. Old storage that had spinning disks had to wait for the data to come around again, so accessing lots of different crates was slow and clunky. Modern “disks” aren’t even disks any more, and that’s no longer a factor. So no matter how “cluttered” or “disorganised” your storage is nowadays, there’s no point defragging as it won’t make the drive get files or folders any faster, and the OS is much better at not breaking up files like that in the first place if it can.
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
Imagine you have to put all the data I give you in crates, as efficiently as possible, and you NEVER get more crates to put things in.
Now imagine that the crates can ONLY hold papers in them up to the top of the crate.
Now I give you – over a course of years – huge amounts of folders and papers to put in those crates but all for different projects.
At first, you’ll want to put one set of folders in each crate, to keep them all together. That works fine. But eventually all the crates will have something in.
At some point, you’re going to have to split a folder and put half of it in one crate and half in another because you have no more empty crates and moving things between crates is slow and expensive (on old disks).
That means that when I ask for that particular folder back, you’re going to need to find two, maybe several, maybe HUNDREDS of crates in order to get all the folder pieces back together for it. That will take you far longer than just handing me a complete folder out of a single crate.
As time goes by, I might not need some folders any more and ask you to destroy them. But they might be spread out among several crates, so you have to delete all the parts. That leaves gaps in some crates at the beginning of your pile of crates, gaps in some crates at the end, and maybe full crates in between. Now when I give you another folder you have to split that folder into parts and put some in the first crates, and then run to the other end and put the rest in the last crates.
At some point, it begins to affect how fast you can find things, and it’s not logical or sensible. So you might decide one day to go through all the crates, put all the folders that are to do with the same project together, keep them all in crates that are next to each other, sort them all into order so you can find things easily again.
That’s defragging. Because of the technical limitations of machines and storage, you didn’t want to make the file reading/writing process any more complicated than necessary as it would slow the machine down when you were using it. So you did things “quickly” when you were given or asked for data even if that wasn’t sensible, and you never had time to “tidy up”. Which meant that eventually the mess built up and you HAD to defrag.
Modern OS simply do things more sensibly, because they have the processing and storage power to do so. And modern drives (SSD and NVMe) literally don’t care how far apart files are. They can get to a crate next to you just as quickly as a crate on the very end of the disk. Old storage that had spinning disks had to wait for the data to come around again, so accessing lots of different crates was slow and clunky. Modern “disks” aren’t even disks any more, and that’s no longer a factor. So no matter how “cluttered” or “disorganised” your storage is nowadays, there’s no point defragging as it won’t make the drive get files or folders any faster, and the OS is much better at not breaking up files like that in the first place if it can.
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