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My grandpa would defrag once a week.
It was an old computer chore that could make a big difference in how fast your computer worked, but few knew about it, much less did it weekly.
That’s probably why it would eventually be baked into file systems (like linux’s ext2), and then be eventually unneeded as hard drives went from being mechanical to solid state.
But there was a good 20 years where defrag was an essential activity for those who wanted peak performance.
I discovered DEFRAG.EXE on our 286. It was a hand me down from Uncle Steven (later, Steven my business partner) that I would play Math Blaster on. I figured out pretty quickly how to exit games and navigate directories and type DIR to see all the files:
At first I typed in each file name to see what it did. I’ve never been much of a “read the manual” person.
That didn’t go so well when I reached FORMAT.EXE and accidentally wiped the entire hard drive. Thankfully in those days there wasn’t much important on personal computers and it was a fun challenge to get it set back up.
Defrag was sort of like a game that made your computer run faster. It was fun to watch and had results. Grandpa and I would sit and just watch it move all the blocks around for 20 minutes or so.
How it made things faster was pretty clever: back then hard drives were sort of like vinyl records. There was a spinning disc (called a platter) and an arm that would traverse over it to read and write (called a head) that would use magnetism to store information on the drive.
It’s remarkable it worked at all or reliably because these things were spinning FAST, reading speeds of 7,200 RPM. That’s 120 mechanical rotations every second going on inside someone’s computer.
So when someone had a “hard drive crash” it probably was literally something crashing because that thing was MOVING.
That’s all very quaint since we all use solid state storage now with no moving parts. It’s a lot more civilized.
So what exactly was defrag doing? It evolved over the years, but let me try and explain the basics. I’m going to do it from memory, feel free to email me corrections so I can feel bad about myself and stay humble.
As you write new files to a hard drive — say you install the shiny new Internet Explorer 1.0 (which will become so popular that in six years the US gov will file an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft) — it has to put the files in free space. That’s made up of stuff you (or your operating system) deleted over the last year, so there’s little holes everywhere. It puts the 120 files that are needed to make Internet Explorer work into those holes, but now to start the program the hard drive has to traverse all over the place — one file at the beginning, another at end, another in the middle and so on and it’s a lot of work for a little hard drive.
So the most basic optimization it did was put all those files together. They can go anywhere on the drive as long as they’re in the same general area, which means the hard drive doesn’t have to “seek” around so much.
Later, it was noticed files could be accessed faster on the larger part of the platter (due to physics or magic or whatever) and it was realized this could solve the new problem of boot speed (the time it takes for a computer to start up).
Around the Windows 95 era file sizes were getting out of control. The previous version of Windows (3.1) needed 10 megabytes (for reference, about the size of 4 photos taken on a phone). Windows 95 needed about 50 MB to work, and Windows 98 bloated into 500MB of free space needed.
Which meant boot times got SLOW. But to speed it up, a good defrag could put all the boot files close together, which save a lot of time of the head having to move all around the drive. The arm could pretty much stay in one place.
So all the first accessed files on the computer would be moved the end of the platter, making boot up times substantially faster.
And then someone figured out — ok I’m almost done here explaining, promise — ALL the most accessed files could be moved to the end of the platter.
I’m tempted to go into more strategies that resulted in speed increases, like pagefiles and swap files (moving commonly accessed files into RAM or a large file), registry cleaning, that kind of stuff. But I’ve already gone on too long about the maintenance tasks of my childhood. These were the sort of chores I could get excited about.
After I left for college, my grandpa kept doing the weekly computer maintenance. Sometimes I wonder if he did it every day. He’d run defrag, then scan for viruses and malware, then run a disc cleaners that would purge caches and abandoned registry items, and so on and so forth until basically it was time to play a few games of mahjong and listen to music and then start the maintenance again.
When I would come down on my breaks, he’d have a list of things for me to help him with. Always written on his self-recycled paper, where one side was used (usually something he printed), then folded in half, so there were two unused sides available.
He’d walk me through each thing he needed help with, and inevitably half of them would work fine. He’d shake his head and mumble “I swear it wasn’t working before, but it always works when you’re here…” and I’d smile and cross it off the list.
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Did I learn any lessons from defrag? Like, maybe to frontload my day with the important stuff? I do that, but did I learn it from defrag? Who knows, but let’s say I did.
All of that was a long-winded way to explain that defragging was a sort of strangely pleasant activity for computer nerds, visually watching the blocks on the computer’s hard drive get moved to freshly organized sections.
It’s sort of like the oddly satisfying videos we watch now of someone cleaning a yard, or pressure washing a rug, except it was ASCII blocks on a screen representing how much faster our computers will fly.
The developers could have just made it a progress bar, but instead they made it a kind of mesmerizing art where you could sit and watch it happen in an entertaining way.
The memetic visual stuck through practically all defrags until the end of their time.
And now you can simulate that anytime you want, because Andrew LeTournaeu and Connor McCall made a defrag simulation website:
That’s all for this week, I’m gonna jump in the car and head to the mountains.
Josh
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PS: There’s a PICO-8 defrag! So cute! Check out the description, I find silly things like that so inspiring. “Removes 100% of fantasy fragments! Makes you feel like you are accomplishing actual work!”
PPS: In 2018 someone set up a hard drive forever defragging on twitch.
PPPS: Not to be confused with DeFRaG.