If you are a computer user at all, you have heard about disk fragmentation and defragmentation. Admittedly, with the development of SSDs, this question is less important today than it used to be, but it remains relevant. Therefore, it is always useful to understand this phenomenon and what solution to implement to contain it.
What is fragmentation?
Every time a file is saved to a computer, it is written to disk in the form of blocks. To make a comparison, it’s a bit like writing a text in a notebook, with a breakdown per page. At the beginning, when the medium is empty, all parts are registered one after the other. But every time a file is deleted, the space it occupied is freed up for new files, which obviously aren’t the same size. Pretty quickly, the new files are broken up into different segments — fragments — that are scattered all over the place. To continue the notebook analogy, it is as if the texts were scattered across non-consecutive pages. This phenomenon is called fragmentation.
While fragmentation isn’t a problem with SSDs, which use electronic circuitry, magnetic hard drives, which are mechanical devices, are a different matter: like vinyl turntables, they have an arm that moves so the reading and recording Print head is positioned in the right place. And when a hard drive is heavily fragmented, the head makes non-stop movements to read and write files, impacting performance – in terms of access time and throughput – while slowing down the computer, which is significantly less responsive.
And fragmentation is an insidious phenomenon. Because in addition to the files that you consciously create or download, there are countless elements that come from operating system updates and invisible data from the Internet (cookies, cache, etc.). Whatever you do, your slices will turn into real Swiss cheese!
However, since this phenomenon has been known for a long time, it is well under control. And operating systems like modern hard drives have features to limit this. Similar to defragmentation, it is a function that merges scattered file fragments to make them faster to read. The handling of the first hard disks was particularly effective and sensitive… and this is still the case today! But as technology has evolved, so have the answers, which new defragmentation and optimization tools provide for the latest storage media.
SSDs, on the other hand, use electronic circuits instead of mechanical devices. Illustrative Photos Bigstock
Should You Defragment Your Hard Drives?
Yes, magnetic hard drives should always be defragmented to avoid slowing down file access. But if you have a PC running Windows 7, let alone Windows 8 or 10, or even a Mac with an operating system less than a decade old, your operating system will take care of everything. Definitely on internal data carriers, regardless of whether they are hard drives or SSDs. If you haven’t changed any system settings, your hard drives are regularly and automatically optimized, with a focus on times when you are not using the computer.
The process is just as automatic on Windows as it is on MacOS. With the tools provided by Microsoft, however, it is also possible to start a targeted optimization and to change the programming of the defragmentations planned by Windows.
When should you defragment?
If you use your computer relatively lightly (you only change a few large files), let your operating system do it for you.
In order not to affect the performance of a computer, it is important to delete unused files from time to time, for example, to keep 10-20% free space on the hard drive (regardless of technology). This gives the system more room to store new files, and its defragmentation and optimization mechanisms do the rest.
Hard drive manufacturers offer free optimization and repair software for download on their website (more often for Windows than for macOS and Linux).
Should an SSD be defragmented?
This is a statement that we often come across: “It is dangerous to defragment an SSD.” Remember that an SSD is a hard disk made up entirely of electronic storage cells (like a USB stick), in contrast to the magnetic hard disk with a movable reading head. Three notes on SSDs:
– The usual defragmentation of hard drives is uninteresting on an SSD, since no mechanical arm has to be moved. Regardless of the location of a memory cell and a file fragment, it is read at the speed of an electron.
– Writes to an SSD increase its wear: Launching a utility that spends its time moving file fragments from one place to another could shorten the lifespan of the media.
– Because SSDs and electronic storage still need to be optimized regularly, they have their own optimization mechanisms: these are called TRIM commands.
Sources: writing and internet
If you are a computer user at all, you have heard about disk fragmentation and defragmentation. Admittedly, with the development of SSDs, this question is less important today than it used to be, but it remains relevant. Therefore, it is always useful to understand this phenomenon and know what solution to implement …