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

For HDDs, Since windows 10 / vista the defragmentation process was significantly refined it was no longer a linear process – instead it would do the most impactful changes which were the minimal effort. This allowed it to be moved to a background process and works when there are free resources.

I believe it’s not longer feasible to visualise in a satisfying way as before due to the size of drives and so it doesn’t have to scan the whole drive to produce the graphic?

Answer 2

For HDDs, Since windows 10 / vista the defragmentation process was significantly refined it was no longer a linear process – instead it would do the most impactful changes which were the minimal effort. This allowed it to be moved to a background process and works when there are free resources.

I believe it’s not longer feasible to visualise in a satisfying way as before due to the size of drives and so it doesn’t have to scan the whole drive to produce the graphic?