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

The short answer is that fragmentation can still happen, but certain techniques and technologies have made it such that it won’t impact you until your drive fills up.

Aside from the fact that we have SSDs which aren’t impacted by fragmentation, we also have newer filesystems that are designed to avoid fragmentation with various techniques that may not have previously been viable in years prior. For example, they’ll leave space between the files so that when the files are updated there is wiggle room, so that the new contents don’t need to be split unless the file has grown significantly, or they’ll move the file if there is another contiguous empty space large enough to accommodate, and/or will defragment “offline” when fragmentation reaches a certain threshold. Fragmentation still can happen, but typically isn’t a problem until your drive becomes so full that it’s impossible for any of these mitigations to be done (ie, there is no contiguous area that is empty for it to move the file into).

Answer 2

The short answer is that fragmentation can still happen, but certain techniques and technologies have made it such that it won’t impact you until your drive fills up.

Aside from the fact that we have SSDs which aren’t impacted by fragmentation, we also have newer filesystems that are designed to avoid fragmentation with various techniques that may not have previously been viable in years prior. For example, they’ll leave space between the files so that when the files are updated there is wiggle room, so that the new contents don’t need to be split unless the file has grown significantly, or they’ll move the file if there is another contiguous empty space large enough to accommodate, and/or will defragment “offline” when fragmentation reaches a certain threshold. Fragmentation still can happen, but typically isn’t a problem until your drive becomes so full that it’s impossible for any of these mitigations to be done (ie, there is no contiguous area that is empty for it to move the file into).