Watching Defrag

Windows 95 was my first PC. Power it on, and there was something called Disk Defragmenter, built in. It tidied up the hard drive. On the screen, little squares lined up in rows, flickering through colors as they packed themselves to the left. I never got tired of watching it.

A hard drive platter reads faster on the outside than the inside. Which makes sense if you think about it: same RPM, but the linear velocity at the edge is roughly twice what it is near the center. Move the files you read most often to the outer tracks and the machine feels faster. Defrag worked with that physics — it pulled fragmented files into contiguous regions and pushed frequently-used ones toward the outside. Simple logic — but watch closely, and the little squares seemed to move with intent.

The OS defrag wasn't enough for me. I ended up buying a paid tool called Diskeeper. It had been built originally for VAX/VMS back in 1981, and apparently held about 95% of the enterprise defrag market at one point. The Server edition ran a few hundred dollars; the EnterpriseServer edition for large volumes was higher still — not the kind of price tag you saw on home software. What I could afford was the consumer Professional edition. A tool whose customers were NASA and the Fortune 1000, installed on my Pentium at home, scheduled to run while I slept, so I could wake up to neatly aligned squares and feel satisfied. A strange hobby, in retrospect.

With SSDs, defrag disappeared. SSDs don't spin a platter, so there's no outer or inner track. Read speed doesn't depend on where the data sits. The very concept of alignment lost its meaning. Defragging an SSD just burns flash write cycles for nothing. Instead, the SSD controller runs wear leveling — to keep writes from piling up in one place, it deliberately moves data to underused regions. In a place where alignment is meaningless, data still gets shuffled, for an entirely different reason. From Windows 10 onward, when the OS detects an SSD, the so-called optimization mostly just sends a TRIM command. The ritual of alignment remains, in form only.

I'd forgotten that feeling for a long time. Lately, I've been spending time letting AI do the work while I sit and watch the screen. It rewrites code, runs tests, re-reads the logs, fixes whatever errors come up, runs again. I sit there with my coffee, watching. Not silently, either — when it goes off on something pointless, misses an obvious case, or tries to skip writing tests, I cut in. Sometimes staying out of the way works better. Sometimes staying out of the way means watching it run straight into a wall.

I could leave my seat. I could walk away and do something else. But before I know it, I've come back to the screen, watching. Time melts away.

In that idle stretch, I caught myself thinking: this is defrag. What it's doing is completely different. Not alignment, not distribution. Something else. Once you started defrag, you could leave it alone until it finished. With AI, you have to take the wheel now and then. Still — watching something move along on its own through a screen — the shape was the same. Productive, or not. Time hanging in midair.

I think I just like watching squares move. Whether on a hard drive or in a terminal, the sight of pieces rearranging themselves on a screen, all on their own, calms me.

Watching things get aligned, I feel like I'm being aligned a little, too. Of course it's just a feeling. Only the squares are moving. I'm not.