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
Solid state storage has changed things a lot. Previously data was stored in a particlar position on a disc and defragging tried to put that data in logical places so that the machine didn’t have to work so hard to read and write it.
Solid state drives have no moving parts and so the seek time is a small fraction of a hard drive’s. The real problem is that each bit on a solid state drive has only a limited number of writes and rewrites, so the drive is trying to strategically spread the use out over all the storage space.
So a defrag not only makes little real sense in a data organization way, but it can potentially lower the life of the drive by putting it through un-necessary write and rewrite 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
Solid state storage has changed things a lot. Previously data was stored in a particlar position on a disc and defragging tried to put that data in logical places so that the machine didn’t have to work so hard to read and write it.
Solid state drives have no moving parts and so the seek time is a small fraction of a hard drive’s. The real problem is that each bit on a solid state drive has only a limited number of writes and rewrites, so the drive is trying to strategically spread the use out over all the storage space.
So a defrag not only makes little real sense in a data organization way, but it can potentially lower the life of the drive by putting it through un-necessary write and rewrite cycles.
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