What is Disc Defragmentation.?

Question

Why Defragment a Lap Top C Drive.

Answer 1

The other answers are good too, but I'll try to (accurately) describe exactly what it is in lamens terms.

Imagine you have a box. You store a lot of things in this box. You put in your tennis shoes. Alright, it's an empty box - you drop your tennis shoes in, right next to each other. You drop in a pair of pants, laying them right next to the tennis shoes. Alright. Still Good. You drop in a lamp. You drop in a DVD player. The box is sorta full, but still has empty places to put stuff.

You then want to put in a 6 pack of coke. There isn't room to put the whole thing in, so you break it up and slide it in at different parts.

Hmm, You don't need that lamp anymore. You take it out (everything else in the box stays in the exact spots - hovering where it was) Well, now you need to put bed sheet in the box. It won't fit in just the lamp spot, so you cut it up into pieces and shove it where it'll fit.

When you need the 6pack, you have to find all 6 cokes. If you want the bed sheet, you're going to have to look in all the different places of the box, and find all those pieces where you cut it up.



That's fragmentation. That bed sheet (file) is fragmented all over that box (hard drive).

Defragmentation tries to rearrange the box and put everything together, or as much as it can, given the size of your box (hard drive) and free space to move stuff around.


If you NEVER defragment, that box might start to look like confettii where you had to cut up things more and more to get it to fit. Pieces of who knows what all mixed together. It'll take you (and your computer) a long time to search for all those parts to be able to use it.



(*Note: Some other people here are posting some misunderstandings of what defragmentation actually is, the lamen example above is correct -- it has nothing to do with files in memory, running, shutting off. It has to do with filling up an entire box and reaching the point where the option to put a bigger item in, is to cut it up. )

Answer 2

The basic idea is that as you write files to disk, a table of contents is created. When you delete a program, rather than erase the disk, it's marked as deleted in the table of contents.

When a new file needs to be written the file system willl attempt to reuse the released space, by writting the new file into the space that was previously occupied by the deleted file. Depending on the size of the new file, this could mean that it might be broken up into a lot of different fragments across the disk, rather than as one contiguous section of disk. The more fragmented files are, the more the read heads of the disk may need to jump around to re-read the file later. As time goes on, the toll this could take, especially if the computer is using the old DOS FAT file system, could really become substantial. Disk defrag tools appeared that simply went through the files and rewrote them to open spots on the disk, reorganizing and rewriting until the majority of files were continguous again.

These days most people using windows use NTFS which is less prone to rapid debilitating fragmentation than FAT was, but which still can slow over time. With Win2k and XP, microsoft decided to bundle a defrag tool that they sublicensed from Diskkeeper. It works acceptably if you suspect that your NTFS drive has become badly fragmented.

Answer 3

From Wikipedia: Defragmentation: In the context of administering computer systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation in file systems. It does this by physically reorganizing the contents of the disk to store the pieces of each file close together and contiguously. It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Some defragmenters also try to keep smaller files within a single directory together, as they are often accessed in sequence. Fragmentation: In computing, file system fragmentation, sometimes called file system aging, is the inability of a file system to lay out related data sequentially (contiguously), an inherent phenomenon in storage-backed file systems that allow in-place modification of their contents. It is a special case of data fragmentation. File system fragmentation increases disk head movement or seeks, which are known to hinder throughput. The correction to existing fragmentation is to reorganize files and free space back into contiguous areas, a process called defragmentation.

Answer 4

When you get lower on space, the computer cant always store your files sequentually, so it scatters them across your hard drive and it has to go around the hard drive to join them up when you open the files, etc.

Defragmenting moves your files around so they are as sequential as possible so that your computer can find files, etc. faster.

If you have 25%+ of your hard drive free then you shouldn't need to defragment your hard drive much.

Answer 5

when windows reads files in puts them into memory, when you close down the files in memory, get wrote back to the hard drive but it does not put them back in the right place, so they finish up anywhere on the hard disk, so you need to defrag the disk a least every week to keep in good order,the more the drive is fragmented the slower it to read them

it is like you going to a filing cabinet and looking for a file in b but the last person to use it put in x position so it would take you a while to find it,,,,

Answer 6

fragmented means scattered. defragging your computer's drives makes all of the files with similar names together so it will load faster. if you do alot of other things while downloading files it will be fragmented since the drive has to go to another section of the disk in order to acess whatever it is you want while saving.

Answer 7

Sometimes when you Delete files from your computer there are some "left overs" so to say that stay behind and when you defragment your computer it helps to determin what files are no longer needed and helps to get rid of them to clear space. It also moves the files around in your computer so that your files arnt so scattered out. this speeds up searches and scans on your computer

Answer 8

After long usage of writing and deleting files to your hard disk, even though your files are all indexed, the actual data gets scattered over different parts of your drive, or "fragmented". This means that in order to read the files sequentially, your drive needs to move all over the disk in order to read them. When the disk is to fragmented reading the files is less efficient and takes longer than if all the files are "de-fragmented".

Answer 9

it defragments your files and stuff so there's more space on your comp, but it takes to long and wastes your time, so use disc clean-up instead

Answer 10

maintain disk performance by defragmenting volumes that use the FAT, FAT32, or NTFS file system