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Remember defragmenting your PC? Here's why you don't need to do it anymore
Defragmenting disks used to be a big thing back in the day. I certainly remember doing it every now and then on my PC back in the mid-2000s, and it felt like it really helped speed up your PC. But these days, you never hear much about defragmenting anymore, so why is that?
Well, the reason is two-fold, but for the most part, it has to do with the fact that today's drives just don't need it. Let us explain.
SSDs don't need to be defragmented
Mechanical storage was different
To start things off, it's important to understand there are two main kinds of storage. You have hard disk drives (or HDDs), which use a spinning platter to access the data on the drive, or you can have a solid state drive (SSD), which uses flash storage that doesn't require mechanical movement.
Back in the day, almost every PC came with an HDD. Accessing data on an HDD requires a platter to spin, while a small arm on the drive moves across it to read the bits of data in each section. At the same time, data stored on a drive is often fragmented and stored in different physical areas of the drive.
This is what makes defragmenting useful. Moving blocks of files closer together on the drive makes it so that the platter and the arm on the drive have to make fewer movements to locate the data you're trying to access, which makes it faster to access said data. There was a tangible benefit.
However, SSDs work differently. There's no physical movement required to access data, and any block of data on the drive can be accessed equally fast. As such, defragmenting has no benefits. What's more, defragmenting means data is being written to the drive, which wears down the SSD faster. As such, Windows actually doesn't defragment SSDs at all, even if you try. There would be more downsides than benefits.
So what does Windows do with SSDs?
You can still optimize them
SSDs can't be defragmented, but the Windows tool for defragmenting and optimizing drives can still help optimize SSDs. However, no defragmentation is happening. Windows simply sends retrim commands to the SSD, which delete unused data from the drive. This can speed up the process of writing new data to the drive later.
This is because deleting files normally doesn't actually erase them from the drive, it just marks that particular block of the drive as unused, so it can be written over later. However, with an SSD, writing over existing data can take a little longer than writing on a completely unused chunk of the drive, so the optimization process helps speed up your SSD when you need it.
Windows optimizes drives automatically
You don't need to worry about it
The other big aspect to consider is that now, WIndows handles defragmentation automatically. The built-in Windows tool for defragmenting and optimizing drives is set to run on a weekly basis basis by default, so your drives don't really have the chance to get any significant amount of fragmentation. You never have to worry about doing it manually.
Of course, you can still do it, and if you have portable HDDs, you can still do it manually, but it's much less necessary than it used to be.
Defragmenting is a thing of the past
With HDDs being phased out more and more when it comes to PCs, defragmenting is not going to get any more relevant anytime soon. I still have memories of using the disk defragmenter back in Windows XP, as I'm sure many others do, but it's not something you need to do anymore. That's a good thing, as drives are much faster now without any optimization anyway.
