Hard Drive Fragmentation and Defragmentation Explained

A Fragment is a piece. If you drop a vase on a concrete floor, you get fragmentation of the vase. Lots of little pieces. Which is pretty much what your data looks like on your hard drive after you've been using it for a few months. Ever try to stick all the little pieces of a smashed vase together again? Well, that's kinda what your computer has to do to get that file that you just tried to open. It's first got to find all those little pieces and stick them all together again, and then present this stuck together file to you.

AND IF YOU THOUGHT THAT WAS BAD...

Now here's the part where it gets worse. When you are finished with the file, and you save it, your computer breaks it up again into all these little pieces, plus some more little pieces that you just added with your edit, and it has to find all the places where it got the little pieces from in the first place, and put them back there. And you wondered why your computer was slow!

HAVE MERCY ON YOUR POOR PC.

When we defragment our hard drive, we are giving the computer a chance to find all the little pieces of all the files, and enabling it to stick all these pieces together and keep them together by saving this whole file in one place on the hard drive. So when you request a file or document, the computer only has to search for one thing, which it joyfully finds and presents it to you on your screen in a very short time.

GIVE YOUR HARD DRIVE SOME AIR

To allow your computer to properly defragment your drive, you need to have a little spare space. So if your hard drive is really full, like more than 80%, it might be a good time to add an additional hard drive. You can see how full your hard drive is by holding down the Windows key and pressing E, then right clicking on the drive's name (eg: DRIVE (C:) ) and then clicking Properties in the popup menu.

FOR THE TECH HEADS.

Technically, what happens during defragmentation is that the pieces of data that make up a file or directory are moved around the hard drive cylinders, sectors and platters to form contiguous blocks of data, so that the hard drive heads do not have to seek out numerous small blocks of data, but instead only have to seek out a few large blocks, thereby reducing seek time and increasing data throughput.

So make life easier for your hard working computer, and it should repay you with faster file retrieval, and a longer, trouble free life.