Flashback to when a classmate in elementary told me defrag meant destroy and then after much hesitation we launched it on a few PCs and left computer class in a hurry, snickering and thinking we left behind a trail of destruction
i remember seeing my dad do this on our family PC. what did defragmenting a windows computer do ? was it a early windows only thing that was eventually solved for (I don't remember doing this once i eventually got a windows lap top in the 2010s)?
Basically, when a file is written to a hard drive, it is written to free space sequentially from start to finish. But what happens when there is not enough continuous free space to fit the entire file?
The file gets fragmented, meaning that one part is written to one strip of free space, second part into another and so on, until the entire file is written.
This means that when later accessing the file, the hard drive reads the first part and then has to jump to the next part, that may physically be stored in a completely different place on the drive. This jump takes considerable amout of time, leading to worse performance.
Defragmenting rearranges the files such that each file is continuous in one place, reducing the number of jumps, improving read performance.
Now that every computer has an SSD in it which does not move physical heads, these jumps do not take virtually any time and, therefore, defragmenting is no longer necessary.
Like @027d8853cb said, with SSDs, random seek is very fast and defrag was not needed. Also the wide adoption of extent allocation in filesystem makes such that fragmentation occures a lot less in modern file systems
Flashback to when a classmate in elementary told me defrag meant destroy and then after much hesitation we launched it on a few PCs and left computer class in a hurry, snickering and thinking we left behind a trail of destruction
Haha frag means destroy so defrag must mean dedestroy?
In any case you left a nice gift for the next computer class
The sound is the highlight for me
took me some time to get it right, glad you like it.
Oh yea sound nailed it!
i remember seeing my dad do this on our family PC. what did defragmenting a windows computer do ? was it a early windows only thing that was eventually solved for (I don't remember doing this once i eventually got a windows lap top in the 2010s)?
Basically, when a file is written to a hard drive, it is written to free space sequentially from start to finish. But what happens when there is not enough continuous free space to fit the entire file?
The file gets fragmented, meaning that one part is written to one strip of free space, second part into another and so on, until the entire file is written.
This means that when later accessing the file, the hard drive reads the first part and then has to jump to the next part, that may physically be stored in a completely different place on the drive. This jump takes considerable amout of time, leading to worse performance.
Defragmenting rearranges the files such that each file is continuous in one place, reducing the number of jumps, improving read performance.
Now that every computer has an SSD in it which does not move physical heads, these jumps do not take virtually any time and, therefore, defragmenting is no longer necessary.
Like @027d8853cb said, with SSDs, random seek is very fast and defrag was not needed. Also the wide adoption of extent allocation in filesystem makes such that fragmentation occures a lot less in modern file systems
That's a fast defrag man, XP was so slow. Enjoining the Real audio, real flash back
LOL so nice! Good vibes from the past.