Do Android phones need to be defragmented like Windows PCs do from time to time?

[Fulani Filot]

I'm just wondering...out of curiosity especially over the issue of junk file management and speeding-up file access times. I'm not well informed on this issue hence my assumption that Android may have this bit in common with Windows.

 

[B. Diddy]

Nope, no defragging needed. Defragging is only for spinning drives, so that the read/write arm doesn't have to move around as much when reading a file. Read here: https://www.pcgamer.com/should-i-defrag-my-ssd/

 

[Rukbat]

That would be like defragging RAM - the situation is the same whether the data is transient or permanent. (That's why people - even manufacturers - call Android storage "memory". Ir's flash memory, used as permanent storage.) The pointer to storage has to change anyway, and changing it from block 1 to block 2, or block 1 to block 5 million, takes the same amount of time. Skewing a disk head all over the platter when a file is badly fragmented is time you'd notice without a stopwatch.

 

[anon(10551781)]

internally it happens, but is not a user trigged process. use Google files to improve space storage management

 

[hallux]

@josedihego Except it's not really needed. Phones use solid-state storage, chips.

Defragmenting was a thing on platter disk drives because it reduced the need of the mechanicals to move all over the platters to find all the parts of a file. File access times in those cases decreased after defragmenting because all parts of each file were lined up so the mechanicals didn't need to move unnecessarily to find all the file parts.

On solid-state storage, there are no moving parts so file access is the same speed no matter if the files are fragmented or not, or if there IS a speed decrease it's negligible.