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.

How to defrag hard drive on mac