While it moves very fast, moving that read/write head still takes time. If you can ensure that all the chunks of a file are next to each other rather than spread out all over, the head doesn’t need to move as much, and reading the file is faster. Much like the laser in a CD player (or the needle on a record player), the disk spins underneath while the head moves in and out to locate the proper “track” that contains the next chunk of the file being accessed. There’s a physical read/write head that moves around on the media when data is being accessed. You normally never see this, because the file system – that “NTFS” or “FAT32” thing you may see referenced from time to time – takes care of locating all those chunks when you read or write a file. That means a file could have its contents spread out randomly over a hard disk’s physical surface. Files are stored in pieces – frequently in 512 byte “chunks” which may or may not actually be physically next to or even near each other. Traditional hard disks are rotating disks of magnetic material with a read/write head that has to move around to find the data. In my opinion, you should never defragment a drive based on solid state memory. You’ve hit one nail squarely on the head: flash devices and SSDs don’t gain significant performance benefit from being defragmented.
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