Disk Defragmentation & Drive Optimization as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2015-05-07
·
1,000 words · ~5 min read
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defragmenting your hard drive it's a lot like changing the oil in your sedan
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something everyone has to do regularly but is unexciting inconvenient and
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therefore very easy to put off at least with oil though most people understand
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the purpose but Windows doesn't really tell you much about what defragmentation
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actually is other than some vague statement about how it makes your drives
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faster so what exactly is it the reason that dis defragmentation is a thing is
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because of the way a mechanical hard drive stores data think of a hard drive
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as a really really long sheet of paper when you first install your operating
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system and put things on it everything is stored in basically a straight line
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starting at the top and working your way down but over time of course you'll
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start changing or deleting files and adding new ones so suppose one of the
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files you delete is located closer to the top of the sheet of paper so you
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don't want to play mind sweeper anymore now you have some free space there
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that's right in the middle of a bunch of other data instead of being at the very
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end like it was when you first started using your hard drive so what happens to
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this free space well suppose you put another relatively large file on your
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hard drive like maybe a filmed speech about how much you love gay Ben or
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whatever you're into what your computer will do is it'll place part of that
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large file in that mind sweeper free space until it's filled up and then
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place the rest of the file Elsewhere on your hard drive this is called file
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fragmentation and it can seriously slow performance because in a mechanical
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Drive the platters have to physically spin to allow the drive's head to access
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the files and if a file is broken up into several parts scattered all over
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your disc it's naturally going to take longer to bring up whatever it is you're
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looking for defragmentation reverses these Effects by doing two things one it
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reassembles any files that have been broken into little pieces and places the
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files in just one physical location on your disc resulting in Faster access two
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it rearranges most of the free space on your drive into one large continuous
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chunk so that your PC won't try to fragment new files or information and
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divy them up into little cubby holes of free space like we did when we were in
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kindergarten now you might be asking but L hold on a second what if I have an SSD
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I heard you're not supposed to defragment those you would be correct uh
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defragmentation doesn't result in the same performance benefits for ssds and
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the reason for this is that since ssds don't have any moving Parts the PC can
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access all the data at roughly the same speed regardless of which chip of the
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SSD is actually holding a particular chunk of a file in fact trying to
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defragment an SSD can do more harm than
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good the cells that actually contain data on an SSD can only be written to so
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many times until they wear out and become completely useless and
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defragmentation uses up a lot of those right Cycles playing digital 15 puzzle
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if you're running Windows 7 or newer though don't fret the OS actually won't even let you defragment any connected
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ssds and will instead give you an option to optimize the SSD what this will do
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instead of defragging is send something called a trim command unlike mechanical
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hard drives on which the data can simply be overwritten the cells on ssds have to
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be erased before new data can be written to them or else you can seriously lose
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performance over time trim erases cells
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with old data that hasn't actually been physically removed from the drive yet
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which I explained in this video by the way ahead of time so the SSD can write
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new information to those cells much more quickly in the future trim is usually
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handled automatically by Windows so you don't need to do much to keep it running
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other than running a trim Checker to ensure it actually is working but if you
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have a mechanical hard drive make sure de fragmentation is running periodically
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otherwise halflife 3 might actually be confirmed by the time the game you're
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