What does defragmentating your Hard Disk do?

Question

On my computer its says that rearanging my hard disk will help it run quicker. I clicked on Analyze and it recommended that i should defragmentate. Should I do this? Will it make it go quicker and will it delete any of my programmes?

Answer 1

Think of your computer as a filing cabinet. As your download files, it just randomly stuffs them in your computer. Defragmenting is like organizing them. It makes things nicer so they are easier to find.

Your computer will probably run a little bit faster. It might not be noticable, but if you don't do it, your filing cabinet will become very disorganized and your computer will run slow. Also, since your files are closer together, you have more room to stuff in new files.

It won't delete anything.

Answer 2

i do it at leas once a month

A hard drive that is badly defragmented is analogous to a bookstore run by a disorganized proprietor. The books are stocked on the shelves as they come in the door without any rhyme or reason and as the books are sold the proprietor slots in new books in their place because they fit the space and not because they are next to similar books.

This is similar to how a Windows organizes its data on its hard drive. A computer will slot a new piece of data in an empty area of the hard drive as well. If the file is too big for the slot, it will break it up and put a piece in one slot and another elsewhere.

The next time you ask the computer to open that file it has to move the hard drive's heads twice to grab the two pieces of the file, which takes more time. Disk Defragmenter acts as an organized employee would. The employee would sort through all the books and organize them in categories on the shelves so that customers could find them more readily

Answer 3

Yes you should do this and no it will not delete anything from your machine.

Defragmenting is a way of reorganising your hard disk. When you save something on your machine, you machine splits the files up into blocks. It will then save these blocks where ever it can fit them. This is called Fragmenting. When you then open one of these fragmented files your machines hard disk will spend time locating all of the fragmented parts of the file and reading them.
By defragmenting, your machine will reorganise the disk so that all fragmented files are brought together in one place. This will cause your machine to read from the disk in slightly faster rates because the read heads do not have to go back and forth looking for the fragmented files.
Hope this makes sense and answers your questions

Answer 4

You see, when you save something on your pc, it uses up a space on the memory, say you then delete that thing and save another. the new saved item wont take up the empty space that the last item was deleted from, it will take up the next available open, un-used space. so over time, your pc has different types of files scattered all over your hard disk, with tons of emty blank spaces inbtween from when you have deleted things, which makes it harder for your pc to find and open something when you want to. So when you defrag, your pc basically scans every single thing on your computer, organises those things into sections of the same kind, and fills all the blank spaces on your hard disk. leacing you with a more organised memory system, more open memory and a quicker pc, because now it can find things easily! It doesnt delete anything, it simply organises it all.

Answer 5

Hey,

Will describe how files are stored and then why defragment is good and what it does (I'll skip analogies).

You computer, not only stores files in different locations on your hard drive, a single file itself is stored in different locations.

Your hard drive stores data in clusters (4KB) being the norm. So if you have a 1 KB file it will actually take up one cluster (i.e. 4KB) on your hard drive. Files bigger than this e.g. a 4MB file will be stored in 1024 clusters which will not be placed sequentially on the hard disk. Each cluster, however, has a pointer to where the next cluster of the file is stored.

What this means is that open/running files can slow down if your harddrive has to constantly seek for where all the parts of the file are stored.

Defragmenting, tries to align all the clusters sequentially and thus remove the seek distance for the hard drive and so increase speed of access and running of files.


A thumbs down, thought that was just for being wrong, obviously for distruntled people also ;) Well I'm a tecchie so my analogies would end up being more confusing and obscure :) There were enough of them there anyhow, so didn't want to futher confuse. Oh sigh, I tried :D

Answer 6

Whenever you open a folder, read a file, play a game, you are performing a similar function to opening a filing cabinet, leaving files and folders on the top, or on the coffee table or placing them back into the cabinet in the wrong order (Similar to Sales Reps invading the office, getting what they want and leaving the mess for admin to sort out.). What de - fraging does is to take files out, find any that have been left out and puts them back into the cabinet in the right order.

You need a bit of spare disc space to do this, as the computer takes files out, puts them in order and puts them back into the cabinet.

You can now, metaphorically, see the coffee table and use that space constructivley, without having to move files out of the way.

Answer 7

Optimization and defgramenting are not the same thing. Defragementing is essentially "picking up' the pieces of fragmented files and making them whole again. Optimization is rearranging files and programs on the hard drive so the the most frequently used files and programs are placed physically on the part of the hard drive that can be accessed quicker.

Answer 8

DEFRAGMENTATION is nothing but ORGANISING the files in your hard disk.
Due to constant deletion and moving of files in your hard drive, after a peiod of time, some empty spaces and garbage data get collected between the useful data.
And the system, thus, takes longer time to fetch those useful files from the hard drive
Windows defragmentor simply removes all these useless data and spaces and rearranges the files according to their position.
Hope this helps.

Answer 9

well it does makes your pc run quicker.. i explain why tho...

everytime you install or delete a program it will put the files to ur harddrive where it has enough space on it.. so when you use a prog and u close it the datas are all over the place on ur harddrive sort of say it separates the files which are suppose to be together . and a defragmentation puts them back to together back in order. by all means .. ur pc runs quicker. and it wont delete any progs.

Answer 10

Microsoft provided us with a utility to organize the sequential layout of our files on our hard drive. As we either add or remove programs from our computer, doing so can cause our files and programs to scatter themselves all over our disk drive. Then when we try to launch a program, our hard drive has to work much harder by searching many different areas of our drive in order to get that program to load for us. And this of course hinders our computer’s performance. So Microsoft’s Disk Defragmenter program addresses this issue by organizing all our programs and files on our hard disk in a sequential easy to search layout.