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Twitch Stream Launches Never-Ending Defrag

I daresay that most people these days don’t bother with running defrags on their hard drive. I’d imagine that many of you reading have not even run one or even have an idea as to what they are. In fairness, if you don’t that’s not a criticism. These days it’s not particularly important for PC maintenance and entirely unrecommended for solid state drives.

A live Twitch Stream, however, is looking to give some of us older PC owners a bit of nostalgia. The stream is constantly showing a defragmentation that never ends! Complete, I might add, with sound effects!

What Is A Defrag?

A defrag is conducted on a hard drive in an attempt to make it run a little faster. This is done by organizing the file clusters so that they are in close proximity to each other. Think of it this way, you want to make a cup of tea, but the tea bags are in the cupboard, the milk is in the fridge, the sugar is on the shelf and the kettle is on the counter. A defrag would look to place all of these items next to each other to make the tea process faster.

In fairness, while this sounds good in principle, the jury has always been out as to whether this really had any significant effect on a system’s performance. In addition, it was really designed at a time where hard drives were a lot slower than they are today. Just to put this into some context, the last time I used to defrag a hard drive on a semi-regular basis was back in 1996 on my Windows 95 Pentium 100.

Watch live video from TwitchDefrags on www.twitch.tv

A Slice Of Nostalgia!

The Stream can be viewed above. Admittedly, watching a never-ending defrag does get a little boring after a while. It does, however, make me feel a little nostalgic for the older days of PC ownership. Days where you were willing to try almost anything to squeeze a bit more speed out of the system. A system that, incidentally, regardless of the spec, you were probably exceptionally proud of.

What do you think? When is the last time you ran a defrag? Do you think they make any difference to system performance? – Let us know in the comments!