Defragging: What do you do exactly when you defrag your drive or file?

Answer 1

Storage on your hard drive is broken down into individual units called blocks. If a file is too big to fit in a single block it will occupy multiple blocks. These blocks aren't necessarily contiguous -- for example, if you open a file and add text to it, it needs more space than it did previously, and that may mean it needs more blocks. If the next contiguous block is being used by another file, a non-contiguous block is used. Over time, files can get spread over more and more non-contiguous fragments, and the write heads on a hard drive have to move around more to get to each piece of the file. When you defrag, you rearrange the pieces of your file or files so that the write head doesn't have to jump around to get to the different pieces, making it faster and more efficient to read the files.

Answer 2

Here is a full detail in a nice basic explination of how Deframenting works

Say your computers hard drive is a filing cabnet, and the files you download and the software you install are files.
Well if you were to put files in a normal filing cabnet you would want to put them in Alphabetical order so when you needed to find a specific file again you could go right to that files Letter and find that file very quickly.
Well De fragmenting your computers Hard drive works the same way. When you install software it doesnt get placed in Alphabetical order, it just gets placed onto your hard drive anywhere.
So when you defrag your computer, your computers defrag software searches your hard drive for every bit of information stored on it and places everything in nice order, so when you ask your computer to find a specific file or to execute a particular program it can perform the actions you have asked it to Very quickly.

Now Further note. Remember a computer is like a Car.
You might ask why am I saying this. Well when you use a computer just like a car you need to do your basic maintainence to keep your computer running up to par. Just like with a car and oil changes. What happens if you dont give a car an oil change or you never give it one. The car starts to run badly and eventually can break down.
Well your computer operates the same way. If you do not clean out your temp files, Cookies, Defragment your computer after a while your computers Hard Drive will become unstable causing it to crash out and eventually Killing your hard drive. This is Fact I have seen it many many times over and have fixed numerous computers by simply cleaning the systems cookies, temp files long with a good old defrag.

So Fragmentation means your systems file order is in bad unorganized shape and needs you to DE Frag it to put it back in order.

I hope this helped you out with your question and gave you a better understanding of what defragmening is all about and I would defragment your computer no less then twice a week or even everyday if you have a nice fast defragment like Disk keeper.
Remember the more you turn on and off your system and run programs they will automatically become Fragmented so defragment on a regular basis for best performance.

Answer 3

do not hassle defragging. On a storage datacontinual, it fairly is not often necessary. in case you ever have time to waste (as quickly as a year) could be better than sufficient. you will not income sufficient by using the defrag to be observed.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

Put simply, it takes the small pieces of programs, and stitches them back together.

Answer 6

Simply put, it sorts all the information out, it puts it where it should be. Quite like tidying your bedroom.