A Defrag Simulator In Your Browser

Disk Defragmenter was a wonderful utility that Microsoft included with Windows back in the day. Back then, you’d use it to theoretically speed up disk access. Today, you can run ….

A Defrag Simulator In Your Browser. Today, you can run a fun simulation right in your browser thanks to [Dennis Morello]. The theory behind defragmenting hard disks was simple.

Your hard drive would store data on spinning magnetic platters. Sometimes, a given file or group of files would end up with their different parts scattered across different parts of a platter, or even multiple platters, as the file system tried to slot everything into the space available over time. On a drive accessed with a literal physical mechanism, this fragmentation of files across multiple areas of a disk could cause functional read speeds to drop.

To solve this, you could defragment the drive, wherein an utility would grab disparate bits of different files and put them physically closer together on the drive platters, such that the read heads could access larger contiguous chunks of files more easily.