ZFrag: A Zen-like game where you manually defrag a hard disk

This would be a really cool concept to turn into a cookie clicker style incremental game. Upgrade auto-defraggers. Move to defragging larger disks, larger page sizes, more complex file systems.

I just realized that I haven't thought about having to defragment a disk in a really long time since it's been almost 10 years that I've used a Windows machine (that's not provided by work), as well as a machine that didn't have an SSD/NVMe for the boot disk.

TIL this is indeed a thing for Linux.

It would be really cool like other people said if it defragged a real disk, but also up the stakes by wiping your drive if you do it wrong or not fast enough (à la Suicide Linux). Though that's totally against the spirit of the game :)

There's probably room for something like this where the game is sorting an array on a sequential tape media.

Could complicate this with color coding groups of sectors into files. IIRC one of the defraggers that used this look did that for "current file"; so a set of sectors lit up red as it was chewing them, then the next, and so on.

Now I'm wondering if anybody's done a screensaver display hack of this.

This would be more fun if it actually linked to a real hard drive. So our game of defragging would be helping some stranger’s disk efficiency.

nice concept!