back in the day defragmenting a hard drive was computers 101 it was something
that even lots of non-tech people knew was a good idea because if you didn't
your computer would take forever to find all the different pieces of the file
that you wanted scattered all around your drive then you'd get really annoyed
and violate your parole again but it's actually been a while since remembering
to manually defrag your system has been all that important and let's get the
really obvious reason out of the way first ssds are more common than ever and
because they can access all of that data that's spread around in different parts
of the disk it's more or less the same time defragmenting them is unnecessary
and in fact can even be harmful for the drive because defragmenting uses up
those precious right Cycles which are very much limited your SSD has a finite
number of those before I mean you might still be able to read
it but you're not going to write anything else but let's say you're using
mechanical hard drives for inexpensive mass storage for running a server or
just because you enjoy how chunky they are well it turns out that you can
probably get away with not defragging your drive for longer than you used to
but why modern file systems have a few different tricks to stop fragmentation
before it even happens on mechanical drives a big one is the use of something
called an extent which is pretty easy to understand conceptually actually it's
just a continuous area of the disk reserved for one specific file this way
as data is added to the file it has pre-allocated space where that data can
go instead of being fragmented and thrown all over the disc platter pretty
much every major current file system uses extends including NTFS which is
what Windows uses however the versions of Windows prior to XP meant mainly for
consumers you know the ones that were still based on MS-DOS still use the more
dated file systems fat 16 and FAT32
which had limited or no support for extends making file fragmentation much
more common another simple but not automatic trick you can try is
compression file compression works by expressing longer strings of data as
shorter strings kind of like how you can use an acronym instead of pronouncing
the full name of whatever it is you're talking about the primary benefit of
compression is to save disk space but it can also reduce fragmentation because
the gaps it leaves for new files are larger meaning that they're less likely
to be fragmented at all newer versions of Windows make it easy to compress an
entire drive with just one click but be warned that depending on what kind of
data you have in your drive and how fast or slow the rest your computer is your
results can vary significantly since compressing and then decompressing files
when you open them back up puts some load on your CPU and if you have lots of
large files compressing can actually make fragmentation worse making
compression more of a try it and see kind of solution but there are a couple
of more interesting techniques that you can benefit from especially if you're a
Mac or Linux user we'll tell you about those right after we thank Ridge for sponsoring this video simple yet elegant
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the link below one really cool feature is delayed allocation or allocate on
flush if you want a name that's frankly crappier is a cool tactic that involves
holding the data that's going to be written on the drive in memory before
it's transferred to the disk while it's being held either in the hard drives
cache itself or in system RAM the file system works to reserve those contiguous
blocks of storage and the data isn't actually written until that outside
memory either or fills up or the operating system is ready to write it
this has the effect of keeping files less fragmented and is a Hallmark of
file systems like apfs which is used by Apple as well as ext4 common among Linux
users but speaking of Apple they were kind of famous for making claims that
macOS hard drives somehow didn't need to be defragmented and this was because
of a feature called transparent defragmentation in h of S Plus where
files below a certain size would be defragmented automatically when you open
them up although this would obviously take a little time it would speed things
up the next time you needed the file and of course make things less painful if
you went a long time since your last manual defrag which they actually made
kind of difficult to do of course none of this is to say that you shouldn't be
manually defragmenting your mechanical drives every now and again or you know
doing it on schedule but these days it's just not as big of a deal if you forget
I wish I could say the same about filing my taxes it is tax season isn't it
thanks for watching guys like dislike check out some of our other videos maybe
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