What is the point of defraging your hard drive?

Answer 1

just in case so 2 times a year, it saves space and makes it run..smoother and faster...or its just in my head lol

Answer 2

When you defrag your machine, you are making your machine work better. Defragging puts all of the pieces needed to run your program in a close proximity to each other on the hard drive. When you delete programs in your hard drive, you leave empty spaces where pieces of the program were inserted during installation. When you load a new program, the computer goes to the first available slot to place all the parts, so your program could be loading pieces at the beginning, middle and end. This forces your hard drive to hunt all over in accessing all the pieces and putting them together to run your application. By defragging the machine, all the program pieces will be moved and put together so your hard drive can run optimally and access programs as fast as it is capable of doing.
Defragging your machine should be part of your regular maintenance. Twice a month should keep your machine running at optimal level. If you load and delete programs often, then defrag more often.
When defrag is re-organizing your hard drive, it is very important that no other programs are using the hard drive. If some program decides to save a file while you are defragging, the defragmentation process will often be interrupted and start all over again. Because of this, defragmentation may take a lot of time.

Answer 3

You are not going to gain any space by performing a defrag, what you are going to gain is performance. This is a simple concept that many people get wrong.

Basically when your computer writes to your hard drive it writes to the first available sector. Through the course of normal use, some things get deleted. So the next time something gets written it started with the now empty location caused by something getting deleted. But that space is only 50 sectors big and the computer needs to write 5000 sectors. So it finds the next available space, which may or may not be enough space. This process is repeated until the file is written. The file is now fragmented because it is written in many different locations. This takes longer to load because the hard drive head has to jump around all over the drive to get all the pieces.

What defragging does is take all those fragments and rewrite the drive to put all the pieces next to each other so the drive doesnt have to work as hard to find them. No extra space is created in this process, you cant create empty space from nothing.

bydyway stated in his post that defragging is not necessary with modern computers. This is another fallacy you should ignore. With small files you may or may not notice the decrease in performance, but your hard drive is till working harder than it has to which can create premature failure. With big files and programs you WILL notice a difference and there are even tools that can measure it.

Answer 4

When personal computers first came out there was some utility in defragging the files on the hard drive; it helped improve the operation speed. But now with microprocessors running as fast as they are there is little, if no, noticeable difference after defragging those files.

So, there is no point in defragging your hard drive with a modern PC.

Answer 5

Making the system run smoothly. Every time you save a file into the HD it's assigned a space, however, if it later grows or is moved, the file can get one piece in one place of the HD and the remaining in another. Obviously this process continues as you keep on using your PC and eventually it's too hard for the computer to read the files. Defragmenting means puting all the pieces back together, so it's easier for the system to find and read the files.

Nevertheless, over-defragmenting can be harmful for your HD, since you are forcing it to read and write too many times the same file.

Answer 6

You should defrag your hard drive because as you use your computer your data gets spread out all over of the hard disks. That slows the computer down because it's looking for those spread out files when they are needed. When you have a defragmented drive, it optimizes the disk space, which speeds up the disks access time.

Answer 7

File fragmentation slows you down, wears out your disk, and threatens your files -

When you first loaded files onto your new hard disk, they weren't fragmented. Each whole file followed the last in consecutive disk clusters, lowest to highest. Your disk performance was never better. When you began using those files, some were broken down into smaller and smaller pieces scattered around the disk. That's because your system writes each new record into the first empty slot it finds on the disk, even if it's nowhere near the rest of the file.

So what? So it takes longer to do your work. With every new fragment, your drive takes longer to access the file because it has to move the drive's read/write heads back and forth to get the next fragment. Your disk works harder accessing fragmented files, so applications run slower and the disk's useful life is shortened.

Fragmentation can actually be dangerous for your files -- if a disk crash or other disaster destroys your file allocation data, you probably will not be able to recover your fragmented files.

Fragmentation degrades performance, increases disk wear and tear, and threatens the integrity of your files. You'll be happier without it!

Answer 8

Many files and programs wind up spread out on the hard drive. Defragmenting the hard drive basically puts everything where it should be. By doing this, your computer should run faster and better.

Answer 9

As files are saved and opened, Windows may have stored peices of the files in different places on the disk, this requires more time to save and open them. A sign of fragmentation is slow reading and writing taking a lot longer to open and save.
By defraging you are tidying up your hd and making it run faster and better

Answer 10

the defrag operation takes little fragments of information that are stored in different places and consolidates these fragments together in ways that make the computer run faster. Also, space is consolidated and files that can be moved closer are moved closer. It does help to do this every few months anyway.

Answer 11

When you save files on your hard, they are saved in a scattered way-they aren't saved in any order-meaning there will always be some wasted space.
When you defrag, what happens is that the computer will more or less compact them in one area-therefore, freeing up some space on your computer for more files.