Back in 1995, my family got our first computer, and despite being a kid at the time, computer maintenance fell in my lap because I quickly became the most tech-savvy person in the household.
Computers in '95 still had a lot of rough edges and so I found myself needing to call tech support on occasion. On one such occasion I got a guy on the line who immediately jumped on the opportunity to be a dick because he could tell I was a kid.
After describing my problem, he asked when the last time I ran a defrag was. (The problem had nothing to do with this.) When I replied that I didn’t know what a defrag was, he busted out laughing for like a full minute, and I could hear him telling his buddy and they started laughing again. He also blamed my problem on this, of course.
So yeah, that’s my defrag story I guess.
Your background of being the family computer expert closely mirrors mine. However, I was too stubborn to ever call support, and instead stumbled through slow internet searches and manuals. Wild how much easier computers are to operate these days.
Sorry for your bad support experience though. At least that hasn’t changed!
Ugh. MS-DOS 2.0-5.0 inclusive didn’t have a defrag tool. It was introduced with dos 6. While it could be helpful, the fact that we went more than a decade without a defrag tool as part of DOS reinforces just how optional it was/is. The benefit of defragging was that it would be marginally faster to read a file that was stored contiguously instead of in pieces. There was the side benefit as well that it was easier to recover data that wasn’t fragmented.
I’m not aware of any legitimate ‘Problems’ caused by simple fragmentation itself. That tech guy was not just wrong in his behaviour, but also in his technical knowledge. What an ass.
Obligatory “I can hear this GIF”
The looping made me look for “Contents modified - Restarting…” 😅
This is me reloading the dishwasher after someone tries to help
Then installing Linux and wondering why I didn’t have to do this…
I still use Defrag for oldschool DOS/Win311/95/98 virtual machine disk images. After I’ve got the VM image set up the way I want, then I’ll defrag it, then write a nulled out DUMMY.BIN to the root folder filling all the free space, then delete the DUMMY.BIN file.
Doing that greatly improves compression of the final archived disk image.
I’m guessing dummy.bin is a zerofile?
Yep
not quite neckbeard, but…
dos tetris (easy mode)
This is the defrag I remember most. Back on a 286/386 it would really make a noticable difference in how fast files and programs would be found and loaded. From my Pentium-based Windows 95 machines and onwards I never noticed quite the same impact of defragging my drives.
Fuck all of this 🤣. It would take so fucking long with that full disk and swapping. I guess that’s a memory haha
Usually you run it overnight and smile in the morning lol
me to gen Z:
bullshit you dont defrag, you never fucking defragged
Is Gen Z: a network drive?
I still have an HDD, am I supposed to defrag it? I don’t think I’ve ever done that.
So it runs automatically in the background?
If you’re running NVME or SSD, you don’t have to worry about fragmentation at all and neither will NTFS or Windows.
On rotational media, recent versions of windows do it when it needs it. NTFS itself has become better about not splitting up files when there’s contiguous space available.
I have two 10 terabyte external hard drives that go whirr (so I assume there are platters in there). Do they need a defrag? I’m running Windows 11.
Defrag is usually only for drives that are written to and data deleted often, creating gaps. If it’s just storage, probably ok. I’ve got 4x 20TB drives in my truenas, but it’s zfs, from what I’ve read, can’t or don’t need to defrag.
Need? Probably not unless they’re nearly full. Get some benefit from? at least a little. NTFS and 11 try to keep fragmentation at bay without killing your disk. New writes that won’t fit in a hole are pushed ahead of the platter until they will.
Go run optimize drives, it’ll tell you what the state is
https://www.elevenforum.com/t/optimize-and-defragment-drives-in-windows-11.3212/
Thank you. Turns out Windows is maintaining everything and no action was needed.
Oh good thanks 🙂
It has nothing to do with the type of media and everything to do with the file system being used by Windows, FAT.
I hopelessly did this on Win 98 without a clue what was happening, so why not?
I’m glad I own a NAS with magnetic hard drives because that disk read/write sound just brings me peace and memories of falling asleep to that sound.
I remember having to use Norton for that.
Absorb my twin I will.
It used to save your hard drive. Now it will destroy your hard drive.
Does this count as an historical irony?
Hard drives used to be irony, now SSDs are more Silicony.
…
I’ll see myself out.
nice
heh
We’ll we didn’t use harddrives anymore except for storage, so it not really irony. You still need to defrag harddrives today.
we didn’t use harddrives anymore except for storage
Parser failed - Syntax error - Kernel Panic
Storage? We still do. But we used to too.
