Defragging a mobile phone

Defragging is used on spinning disk storage to optimize the location of data for speed of access. Your phone does not have a spinning disk, it has solid state storage with equal access speed to all of the storage, so there is no benefit to defragging. In fact, modern spinning storage doesn’t need to be defragged either, because drives have large caches.

Freeing up storage space on your iPhone.

Here are some helpful articles that can guide you on how to free up storage space on your phone.

How to check the storage on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201656

Manage your photo and video storage

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205703

Clear Other storage on your iPhone or iPad

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211686

Hi Lawrence - just want to say I’ve noticed your answers come up for a lot of things I search for when troubleshooting my iPhone, so thanks for your contributions.

also, I die laughing at your patience and responses to some of the… less technologically savvy individuals that come on here. My favorite being your multiple answers in reply to peoples poor reading comprehension/intelligence/conspiratorial thinking in your red/orange microphone indicator dot thread.

thanks for those laughs, I needed them!

karol60 wrote:

Ok, then maybe I have a lot of cookies stored. Can I delete them and how do I pick and choose? Will this free up space in my storage?

You can delete cookies, either individual or all cookies in Settings/Safari. But cookies don’t take up much storage. In addition to what Kurtosis12 has linked to, you can frequently free up space by backing up your phone, then restoring the backup you just made. This will “clean up” any storage corruption, which can happen if a sync or backup is interrupted.

Back up the phone first, of course:

1. How to back up your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch - Apple Support
2. Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to factory settings - Apple Support 
3. Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from a backup - Apple Support

Not really. There isn't quite the seek time issue with flash-based drives that one had with spinning platters and moving heads. The limitation on speed is mostly just the speed of the internal data interfaces. Flash drive controllers and the operating system already employ techniques like "wear leveling" that move data around to avoid concentrating system writes in specific physical memory locations.

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/noticeboard/general-noticeboard/why-you-shouldnt-defragment-a-solid-state-hard-drive-2011-11/

SSDs are able to read blocks of data that are spread out over the drive just as fast as they can read those blocks that are adjacent to one another. Furthermore, they keep track of the order the files are written using a technique called ‘wear-levelling. This purposely writes data to the drive in such a way that its cells wear out evenly; which means that the drive does not degrade prematurely.

If you really think you need it, there aren't any third party tools that can access an iPhones storage directly and Apple certainly doesn't provide anything for the user. The only thing close a defrag would be to restore the operating system to factory settings and recovering from a backup.

You can’t do it on a laptop that has a solid state drive either, or one with a hybrid (fusion) drive.

And defragging does not free up any space; it just moves data around, but the amount of data doesn’t change.

karol60 wrote:

Ok, then maybe I have a lot of cookies stored. Can I delete them and how do I pick and choose? Will this free up space in my storage?

There is a way to delete pretty much everything from Safari including cookies, cache, etc with Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data. However, it's going to go up once you start browsing websites. Another way to specifically control that is Settings > Safari > Advanced > Website Data where each website's data can be cleared by swiping left and tapping on "Delete". There may not be any though. There are other ways to delete individual app data that you might not need, but I'm not sure off the top of my head how to do it.

And you seem to be concerned about too much storage being used. It's drastic, but often the best way to clear up stuff (especially the "Other" storage category) is to do that backup, restore to factory settings, and restore from backup that I mentioned previously. I actually did that yesterday in order to install iOS 15.2.1 when it wouldn't otherwise install because I had less than 900 MB of free space. Right now my iPhone says it has 1.3 GB of free space. Not a whole lot more, but it obviously cleared up some data that wasn't strictly needed.

Good luck with your iPhone.

GreeniusGenius wrote:

You can only do it with a laptop with an HDD, not an SSD or eMMC drive. So on any decent modern laptop, defragging is not a thing.

With an aftermarket defragging tool one can still do it, but it's of questionable utility. And wear leveling moves the virtual addresses around to different physical addresses, so what would be the point even if there was some benefit of having data moved to contiguous segments?

No

Even if you could, it would serve no purpose. Defragging is really only relevant to performance when using spinning disks.

And even if you could it is not recommended. Every time you write to solid state memory, it damages it very very slightly. All it would do is shorten the memory life on your phone.

Thanks, I’m glad I’m entertaining😏

You can only do it with a laptop with an HDD, not an SSD or eMMC drive. So on any decent modern laptop, defragging is not a thing.