Get the latest tech news

A Brief History of Defragging


As Mac hard disks grew larger, fragmentation of file data, file system metadata and free space slowed the disk down. Here’s how we used to solve that.

This proved profitable until SSDs became more widespread and Apple released APFS in High Sierra, forcing Coriolis to shut down in 2019, when defragging Macs effectively ceased. Although solid-state media can have slight overhead accessing disparate storage blocks sequentially, this isn’t thought significant and attempts to address that invariably have greater disadvantages. Manually defragging HFS+ hard disks was always a questionable activity, as Apple added background defragmentation to Mac OS X 10.2, released two years before Coriolis was even founded.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of brief history

brief history

Photo of Defragging

Defragging

Related news:

News photo

A Brief History of Blockchain Interoperability

News photo

A Brief History of Microprogramming (2022)

News photo

A Brief History of Booby-Trapping Electronics to Blow Up