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
After Windows XP Microsoft basically set an automatic task that would run when it detected the computer to be idle that would quickly defrag commonly used data. Pretty great for mechanical spinning hard drives and it meant you really didn’t need to do a full defrag anywhere near as often as you used to. Once we switched to Solid state drives with no moving parts it became far less necessary because even if your data isn’t physically adjacent on the drive, the drive controller still has access to all the data at once without a seek time (time it took for a mechanical drive to spin up, move the read head, and retrieve the requested data). Technically you CAN defrag an SSD, but it doesn’t lead to noticeable improvement and it may actually shorten the life of the drive overall due to the added read/write cycles.
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
After Windows XP Microsoft basically set an automatic task that would run when it detected the computer to be idle that would quickly defrag commonly used data. Pretty great for mechanical spinning hard drives and it meant you really didn’t need to do a full defrag anywhere near as often as you used to. Once we switched to Solid state drives with no moving parts it became far less necessary because even if your data isn’t physically adjacent on the drive, the drive controller still has access to all the data at once without a seek time (time it took for a mechanical drive to spin up, move the read head, and retrieve the requested data). Technically you CAN defrag an SSD, but it doesn’t lead to noticeable improvement and it may actually shorten the life of the drive overall due to the added read/write cycles.
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