Do harddrives employ write spreading?

[watdahel]

Well do they? Do harddrives have a read/write-wear strategy or do they always write sequentially, writing at the first empty sector? If I save a 2 MB file to disk and then erase it and then save again does it occupy the same physical space on the disk?

 

[Ocellaris]

Regular hard drives? No.

SSDs? Yes.

 

[BinarySynapse]

For the most part, they write to the sectors they're told by the OS to write to. However, if a sector becomes unreadable, the drive can remap that sector to a spare.

As for deleting a file and re-saving it, it depends on the the OS and the file system it's using whether or not it'll occupy the same space.