Is Defragmenting Useless Now?

Is defragging your drives now a waste of time - even if you're using mechanical hard drives?

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[northwestrepair]

I remember there was a time when you had to manually disable automatic defrag because it was causing issues for SSD drivers

[voidmayonnaise]

Defragmenting was so satisfying, though 😢

[alejandroespinoza]

Therapist: "The Intel CPU in an AMD socket doesn't exist and can't hurt you"
Intel CPU in an AMD socket: 2:26

[pyromethious]

Defragmenting was almost calming sometimes. Watching it move stuff around was cool to watch.

[DoctorX]

2:27 not sure if the editor put an Intel chip on AM4 to trigger someone, or just a silly mistake

[taznz]

The trick back in the day before SSD became the norm, was to make a small partition at the end of the drive say 4-8gb, then move the paging file (swap file) to this partition. Before we all had many gigabytes of RAM, the constant expansion and contraction of the paging file was the cause of a huge percentage of the disk fragmentation, by moving it to its own partition it no longer effected files saved to the rest of the drive. This one trick dropped fragmentation by 80%.

[igotheals]

Apple's claim about never needing to defragment usually butted up against an odd, somewhat edge case: having to resize a drive. If you needed to resize a partition and there was data in the area that needed to be unallocated, OS X would simply refuse to do it. I ran across this problem quite often; the only solution in that case would be to do a full defragmentation, but you usually needed a third-party tool for this as OS X never really had a nice GUI tool that people could easily use to do the job.

[smileymattj]

There was some important key points this video missed.

Ever since Windows 7. There is a scheduled task built into windows that automatically defrags drives. So the biggest reason you don’t need to manually do it yourself is because Windows already does it.

Sometime in Windows 8 or 10. Defrag.exe was given SSD support. It will recognize that the drive is an SSD and not defrag it. Instead it will preform trim on the SSD. The above mentioned scheduled task still exists. So no matter which drive type you have, or mixture. Defrag.exe will maintain each drive using the proper method for its type.

[bumbalaaa]

2:26 Intel CPU in an AM4 socket is one of the more cursed things I’ve seen so far this week

[paineretlaw]

I know that it's not a big deal but when it showed the CPU sweating that was a Intel chip ib a AMD socket lol

[nicholas_scott]

I remember fragmenting was mostly an issue if you ran out of space on the harddrive. That meant you knew the fragments would be terrible. An old trick would then be to delete some huge files, then move the files from one drive to another and back. That would help defrag a chunk without going throug the hoops

[jh]

I've been migrating servers to VMs over the last 10 years for customers. I use defraggler constantly to move sectors to the front and shrink the disk space to save VM space if necessary. Now a days backup and restore applications can help with that, but defragging was helpful most of the time

[JGreen-lexx]

Watching that old defrag going is ASMR for geeks. ❤

[Anacronian]

Really appreciate that Anthony put on some nice nail polish for those close-ups of the M.2's.

[innxir]

can we talked about how cursed the graphic at 2:25 is? The 9th Gen Intel®Core™ i5 in a "SOCKET AM4" is def not a thing i expected today lul

[janno]

I would like to see Linus do a performance comparison between a drive of different file fragmentation percentages, 1% 5% 10% 15% etc and between a 0% fragmentation.

[reallybigjohnson]

I have to admit that I actually enjoyed watching the defragger that I used. I forgot the name but it had a circle and it was kind of relaxing to watch the little blocks organize themselves.

[ErrorMessageNotFound]

It might be worth mentioning (because I've never seen anyone talk about it) that windows has integrated "TRIM" into "Defragment and Optimize Drives" such that if you run it on an SSD it will TRIM the drive instead.

[AlanTheBeast]

I don't recall the last time I de-fragged a disk - probably pre-2000.
Once drive sizes get to a certain huge size it just doesn't make sense much as a re-write of a file will leave a small block, but eventually these small blocks are adjacent and make room for a larger file.

[kekistanifreedomfighter]

props to the editor for sneaking in 2:25 lol