So to read that file, the head of the drive had to move all over the platter constantly to get bits and pieces here and there. Some of the more fragmented files were split up into 200+ fragments spread out all over the drive. The playback would be very choppy and virtually unusable. This was the early days of Plex and an older router. When that drive was heavily fragmented, streaming videos at home was a pretty awful experience.
For myself, the only HDD I have in use today is an external drive that mostly contains some backups and a large media library. They are so fast that any fragmentation that exists will not be noticed, so there's no real need to reduce its useful life with all that activity.ĭo periodically defrag your HDD, ESPECIALLY if you are a media content creator/user.
Larger files aren't defragged, and the larger the file is, and the more fragmented it is, the more the drive has to work to read all of it.ĭon't defrag an SSD. I forget the exact size limit, but it's small, perhaps 50 MB or so. What macOS does is automatically defrag files under a certain size. It is a gross misconception that they don't. Part of being a smart technologist (not just a dumb PC nerd) is to evolve your understanding of things as the technology changes.ĭo Macs get fragmented? Absolutely yes they do. So with the combination of advancements, the potential big bump in performance you got from defragging your drive 15+ years ago is not even worth the effort today. Even spinning disks have gotten faster with multiple heads and really quick seek time. With SSD's, the seek time has been essentially negated, so you don't pay that penalty for looking all over the drive for your data. If the drive had to jump all over the place for the data, then you'd have delays in getting the data and thus buffering issues and choppy video playback.įast-forward to today, machines today have minimal 8GB of memory or more. If the data was all located near each other, the speed in which you got the data would allow for smooth playback. The video player couldn't keep very much of the video in memory, so it would constantly have to go back to the disk to read more and more and buffer a little bit for smooth playback.
Think about a system that has say 2 or 4GB of memory, and you were try to load a 600 or 1GB video file to play. This was a very prevalent thing hyped up by software makers as a way to increase performance, so a lot of marketing dollars went into that.īack in the day with slower CPU speeds, slower IO speeds and spinning disks, having the reading head of the HDD seek all over the platter for your data was indeed a potential bottleneck if you were trying to read something in a very sustained fashion. With current computers and their overall performance, defragmenting is not necessary at all.
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