defragmenting your hard drive it's a lot like changing the oil in your sedan
something everyone has to do regularly but is unexciting inconvenient and
therefore very easy to put off at least with oil though most people understand
the purpose but Windows doesn't really tell you much about what defragmentation
actually is other than some vague statement about how it makes your drives
faster so what exactly is it the reason that dis defragmentation is a thing is
because of the way a mechanical hard drive stores data think of a hard drive
as a really really long sheet of paper when you first install your operating
system and put things on it everything is stored in basically a straight line
starting at the top and working your way down but over time of course you'll
start changing or deleting files and adding new ones so suppose one of the
files you delete is located closer to the top of the sheet of paper so you
don't want to play mind sweeper anymore now you have some free space there
that's right in the middle of a bunch of other data instead of being at the very
end like it was when you first started using your hard drive so what happens to
this free space well suppose you put another relatively large file on your
hard drive like maybe a filmed speech about how much you love gay Ben or
whatever you're into what your computer will do is it'll place part of that
large file in that mind sweeper free space until it's filled up and then
place the rest of the file Elsewhere on your hard drive this is called file
fragmentation and it can seriously slow performance because in a mechanical
Drive the platters have to physically spin to allow the drive's head to access
the files and if a file is broken up into several parts scattered all over
your disc it's naturally going to take longer to bring up whatever it is you're
looking for defragmentation reverses these Effects by doing two things one it
reassembles any files that have been broken into little pieces and places the
files in just one physical location on your disc resulting in Faster access two
it rearranges most of the free space on your drive into one large continuous
chunk so that your PC won't try to fragment new files or information and
divy them up into little cubby holes of free space like we did when we were in
kindergarten now you might be asking but L hold on a second what if I have an SSD
I heard you're not supposed to defragment those you would be correct uh
defragmentation doesn't result in the same performance benefits for ssds and
the reason for this is that since ssds don't have any moving Parts the PC can
access all the data at roughly the same speed regardless of which chip of the
SSD is actually holding a particular chunk of a file in fact trying to
defragment an SSD can do more harm than
good the cells that actually contain data on an SSD can only be written to so
many times until they wear out and become completely useless and
defragmentation uses up a lot of those right Cycles playing digital 15 puzzle
if you're running Windows 7 or newer though don't fret the OS actually won't even let you defragment any connected
ssds and will instead give you an option to optimize the SSD what this will do
instead of defragging is send something called a trim command unlike mechanical
hard drives on which the data can simply be overwritten the cells on ssds have to
be erased before new data can be written to them or else you can seriously lose
performance over time trim erases cells
with old data that hasn't actually been physically removed from the drive yet
which I explained in this video by the way ahead of time so the SSD can write
new information to those cells much more quickly in the future trim is usually
handled automatically by Windows so you don't need to do much to keep it running
other than running a trim Checker to ensure it actually is working but if you
have a mechanical hard drive make sure de fragmentation is running periodically
otherwise halflife 3 might actually be confirmed by the time the game you're
playing whatever one it is actually loads speaking of loading I'm sure our
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