defragmenting?

Question

how long does it take and what does the fragmented files, free space, all that stuff mean??

Answer 1

how long depends on:
1. what you use to defrag (the windows built in defrag or third party tools like diskeeper, O&O, Perfect disk, etc.
2. How fast the disk is
3. How fragmented the disk is.
and then it will take a minute or so... or HOURS.

As for what all that stuff means, think of it like this - you've got 3 books you are writing. You work on them all at once. Now, each time you write a page, for any book, you just stick it in a box called writing (the box represents your hard disk, each book represents your a file). Now, you have all the pages... you can read/reread each book. BUT, it takes you longer because you have to find each page every time you're ready for the next. Wouldn't it be easier to simply put the pages to each book in their own pile? Well, defragmenting essentially does that. IT does NOT get you any more space, but it makes reading the files go a little faster. MOST of the time, you will NOT actually NOTICE the difference in speed - but it will be noticable when you copy LARGE files from one place to another.

To put it another way. Lets say you have a bookcase with a few empty slots for books on each shelf. Now you want to put the new encyclopedia on the book shelf - you can put one book in each spot, but it's not very organized and it will take you longer to find the right volume when you need it. OR you can rearrange the placement of books so all the volumes are sequential and you'll be able to find it faster.

Answer 2

This is typically only "necessary" to do on a non-journaled file system such as NTFS/FAT aka Windows. A hard drive becomes fragmented because when you save, delete, and move files around they are split up to fit into the closest locations on the disk platter. But that means they aren't kept in one place. So a video file may be spread all over your hard drive like buckshot.

It makes for quick file operations, but after a while your computer has to find all the pieces of a file when you want to open it again and the more fragmented, the slower things become.

When you defragment, software just goes through and puts all the bits of a file together again so they're in an easy/quick to find place. And the process repeats.

You should defrag about once a month depending on how much use your computer and how long it will take depends on how fragmented things are and how many files are on your machine.

Answer 3

It depends on how much is fragmented, the free space, and the size of the hard drive.

1.) Fragmented files. Files that are split into different parts on the hard drive. Usually caused by moving things and having a full hard drive

2.) free space. What it sounds like. Empty space on the hard drive where there is absolutely nothing.

3.) Unfragmented files. Files that are not fragmented and all in one place

4.) Non-moveable files. Files for your operating system (Windows) that can't be moved because they're being used.

Answer 4

It take a while the first time if you have little or no open space.
What it does is move file that are alike close together so it doesn't take as long to open it. Say for instance you have a five page word doc well one page maybe front of the harddrive and last at the end. It would take some time for the Hard Drive to find it therefore taking longer to open it. So by defragmenting you put file close together for easy access and open free space on your hard drive so when you save something it. can be all together also.

Answer 5

Depends on your hard drive's size, how fragmented files are, and so forth. Also depends on how fast your system is and what kind of hard drive it is. Theres no real way to tell. I can say that I could defragment on an older machine with a 1 ghz chip, speedstep, and 256 mb of ram in like 30 minutes. A really good program that does all this for you is called diskeeper. Windows washer is another good program for computer maintanence. Anyways, hope that helps.

Answer 6

There are a lot of factors. Your computer's speed, the bus speed of your mobo, how much ram you have, how fast your hdd is, how fragmented it is, how full it is, capacity, what utility you are using and if you are defragmenting the swap file and free space. Also if the disk is FAT32, NTFS, etc. I use perfect disk.

Answer 7

depends on how big your hard drive is could take up to an hour, what is does is make space on your drive to perform better, by movie files around