what is 'defrag free space' good for?

[forklift]

and another one says 'defrag free space (allow fragmentation)'

??

[FuzzeWuzze]

and another one says 'defrag free space (allow fragmentation)'

??

Watch this GIF a few times


It shows a drive that is fragmented, and then defragmented.

When your defragmenting your basically re-organizing the data to make better use of your drive space, because over time gaps form on the disk.

Say an app requests to write 1000 blocks, it gets blocks 3000-3999. It then later requests to delete those blocks, so now you have 1000 empty blocks just floating in the middle of your drive. Say another App then wants 1001 blocks, it has to find somewhere else to put the data that has 1001 blocks available, in essense that 1000 is dead space that will not be efficiently used. By defragmenting you align everything, so not only is all data from the same "app" contigous on the drive(easier/faster to read than having to skip all over the disk for data), it basically realigns all of your free space...

Long answer..lol hopefully im mostly right, thats how i understand it works more or less.

[neilsabo]

not gonna lie, i sometimes get mesmerized by the defragging animation and watch that **** for like 5 minutes straight

[MaxPunishment]

not gonna lie, i sometimes get mesmerized by the defragging animation and watch that **** for like 5 minutes straight

Same, but lettuce bee reality, defragging is much less essential now than in years past considering the read speed of modern drives at 7200rpm. The difference in speed between a fully defragged drive and moderately fragmented drives is almost negligible, but still it's a good thing to do

Also you never want to defrag a solid state drive, will significantly decrease it's lifetime

[illriginalized]

One thing's for sure.. if you have a Solid State Drive.. do NOT use defrag on it.

[InvidGurab]

Lol this reminds me of the Window 98 defrag.

[NewYorkGiants]

and another one says 'defrag free space (allow fragmentation)'

??

Basically when you install a program your OS assigns it a section of memory. When you delete the program or parts of the program, that memory becomes free again. So you have a gap in memory that is being unused, and often times its too small to be usable for anything. This is known as "fragmentation" because you have broken sections of unused and used memory. Defragging reorders memory by swapping it around so that all used memory is in one consecutive block followed by all unused memory. This makes it faster to read and wastes less memory.

In reality in modern day computers, you should really only need to defrag every 6 months - 1 year. We are not desperately begging for hard drive space anymore since it's become so cheap and available. Back when we had 500Mb hard drives it was a lot more important to not lose 50Mb to fragmentation than it is now.

[MaxPunishment]

Lol this reminds me of the Window 98 defrag.

O&O Defrag still rocks this style too, great program, it's my go to defrag. PerfectDisk messed up one of my drives once but I was able to fix it

[mTm]

Files on your hard drive are never "gone" or "deleted". They are still there, it's just that the OS flags those bits on that part of the disk to be used for something else and turns that data invisible to the user. So technically you can still defrag those files.

[its50]

One thing's for sure.. if you have a Solid State Drive.. do NOT use defrag on it.

aware me on why not? i was just about to defrag when i saw this thread lol

[illriginalized]

aware me on why not? i was just about to defrag when i saw this thread lol

SSD do not have to access files from platters hence there is no need to defrag them.

Above that, defragging SSD will do more harm to the overall health of the SSD than not defragging. It'll destroy (slowly but surely), the write and read speeds.. which is what makes SSD infamous and better than the HDD.

One major advantage Linux has over Windows is the fact that Linux is more advanced, yet simpler, on how it handles files. Thus Linux does NOT need to be defragged. In fact, there's no reason in the world to ever use a defragging application in Linux. They exist... but they're utterly useless.

[MaxPunishment]

All you need to do with an SSD is run the TRIM software to free up used space after you've deleted files, no defragging

[illriginalized]

All you need to do with an SSD is run the TRIM software to free up used space after you've deleted files, no defragging

Word.

Look up Intel TRIM. Install it. When you "delete" a file, then "empty" the trash, it won't harm your SSD.