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 defragmenting does is move files that are split physically over different parts of a magnetic disc (in HDD, in general) together, so that when you access that file it can do it reading from the same area instead of having to go back and forth in search for a piece here and a piece there.
in SSD, defragging is simply detrimental – as there’s nothing spinning and no real physical sectors to keep contiguous, the only thing you are doing is wasting memory cells’ writing cycles.
on HDD it is still a thing – it’s just that it doesn’t matter as much for storage, if you access your stuff in a second or in 3. for cases where it does matter, it is still very much a thing.
phones and 99.9% of portable devices don’t use HDD anymore but just use flash memory for storage, and that one you shouldn’t (and in most cases can’t, as explained above) defragment.
To this, you have to add ram quantities. when ram was a couple (let alone less) GB, you can’t keep a lot of stuff in there and you have to keep reading the disc. Nowadays it’s fairly standard for a new pc to have at least 16GB, which makes keeping something there (instead of having to retrieve it from a disk) way easier and faster.
I believe these are the reasons why you have stopped defragmenting so much.
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 defragmenting does is move files that are split physically over different parts of a magnetic disc (in HDD, in general) together, so that when you access that file it can do it reading from the same area instead of having to go back and forth in search for a piece here and a piece there.
in SSD, defragging is simply detrimental – as there’s nothing spinning and no real physical sectors to keep contiguous, the only thing you are doing is wasting memory cells’ writing cycles.
on HDD it is still a thing – it’s just that it doesn’t matter as much for storage, if you access your stuff in a second or in 3. for cases where it does matter, it is still very much a thing.
phones and 99.9% of portable devices don’t use HDD anymore but just use flash memory for storage, and that one you shouldn’t (and in most cases can’t, as explained above) defragment.
To this, you have to add ram quantities. when ram was a couple (let alone less) GB, you can’t keep a lot of stuff in there and you have to keep reading the disc. Nowadays it’s fairly standard for a new pc to have at least 16GB, which makes keeping something there (instead of having to retrieve it from a disk) way easier and faster.
I believe these are the reasons why you have stopped defragmenting so much.
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