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 a town with 50 houses. In each house is a piece of paper. On that paper is a chapter of a book.
You’re tasked with putting the book together for your publisher. You have the index in your hands which shows you where the chapters are in the town by their address.
The old way would be to run to each house in order, and pick up a chapter of the book and then stick them together and then give someone the book. Chapter One might be next door to you, and Chapter Two might be across town. Defragmenting would be like putting all the chapters sequentially in neighboring houses so you could just walk down the street and pick up the chapters in order.
The new way is like having a computer network where you can just download the book piece by piece near instantly from each house.
Most drives in the older days (HDD) had spinning platters where heads would have to read data from one part of the drive, move the head, spin the drive, and read data from another part. This head moving took time. Defragmentation actually put data on the drive in sequence, so the head wouldn’t have to move back and forth to get the data. In fact, some drives put higher-used data on the outer edge of the drive since it had a higher rotational velocity and more data per “row” It’s called [Zone Bit Recording](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_bit_recording).
Newer drives (SSD) use flash storage, or chips. There’s no moving parts. You simply have a set of memory addresses and can fetch them quite quickly without any delay in between chunks that are read.
Also fun fact: Most modern OSs won’t let you defragment SSDs because A) it makes no sense and B) you have a limited number of writes on each address of the drive before it [fails](https://www.crucial.com/articles/about-ssd/should-you-defrag-an-ssd).
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 a town with 50 houses. In each house is a piece of paper. On that paper is a chapter of a book.
You’re tasked with putting the book together for your publisher. You have the index in your hands which shows you where the chapters are in the town by their address.
The old way would be to run to each house in order, and pick up a chapter of the book and then stick them together and then give someone the book. Chapter One might be next door to you, and Chapter Two might be across town. Defragmenting would be like putting all the chapters sequentially in neighboring houses so you could just walk down the street and pick up the chapters in order.
The new way is like having a computer network where you can just download the book piece by piece near instantly from each house.
Most drives in the older days (HDD) had spinning platters where heads would have to read data from one part of the drive, move the head, spin the drive, and read data from another part. This head moving took time. Defragmentation actually put data on the drive in sequence, so the head wouldn’t have to move back and forth to get the data. In fact, some drives put higher-used data on the outer edge of the drive since it had a higher rotational velocity and more data per “row” It’s called [Zone Bit Recording](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_bit_recording).
Newer drives (SSD) use flash storage, or chips. There’s no moving parts. You simply have a set of memory addresses and can fetch them quite quickly without any delay in between chunks that are read.
Also fun fact: Most modern OSs won’t let you defragment SSDs because A) it makes no sense and B) you have a limited number of writes on each address of the drive before it [fails](https://www.crucial.com/articles/about-ssd/should-you-defrag-an-ssd).
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