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There are several reasons for this.

1. Fragmentation - As you keep using a computer with a mechanical drive, the drive gets fragmented. The more things are deleted, the more gaps there are between files, and the more the files get split up. So if a file is split, the hard drive heads must travel to the different places to read the entire file. So that slows performance if this happens to many files.

2. The hard drive geometry - In modern mechanical drives, there are more sectors in the outer cylinders than the inner ones, and the cylinders are grouped into zones. So the outer zones will be faster than the inner ones, since the heads don't have to move as much. So if your most used files are in the outer zones, the computer will "feel" faster. After a while, the inner zones are all that are left.

3. SSD drive filling - A fresh SSD drive works faster than a used one. That is because of how flash RAM works. To reuse SSD blocks, those blocks have to be formatted, and it takes more time to write to one that needs formatted than it does to fresh ones. That is why the drive must be TRIMmed from time to time. That way, the unused blocks that need formatted get formatted so future writes will be faster. However, this might not be an issue in the future since Intel has invented a new type of memory to use with SSD drives that don't need to be formatted after every use.

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10y ago

There are a couple of reasons for this.

1. Fragmentation - As you keep using a computer with a mechanical drive, the drive gets fragmented. The more things are deleted, the more gaps there are between files, and the more the files get split up. So if a file is split, the hard drive heads must travel to the different places to read the entire file. So that slows performance if this happens to many files.

2. The hard drive geometry - In modern mechanical drives, there are more sectors in the outer cylinders than the inner ones, and the cylinders are grouped into zones. So the outer zones will be faster than the inner ones, since the heads don't have to move as much. So if your most used files are in the outer zones, the computer will "feel" faster. After a while, the inner zones are all that are left.

3. SSD drive filling - A fresh SSD drive works faster than a used one. That is because of how flash RAM works. To reuse SSD blocks, those blocks have to be formatted, and it takes more time to write to one that needs formatted than it does to fresh ones. That is why the drive must be TRIMmed from time to time. That way, the unused blocks that need formatted get formatted so future writes will be faster.

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Q: Why do hard drives slow the computer as they fill up?
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