what is defreagment on your computer?

Question

What does the defragment do on your computer's hard drives? does it make it run faster, or is that Disk CleanUp? When should i defragment my hard drives, once a month??

PLEASE HELP!

Answer 1

As you use your hard drive, blocks of information for a file spread across the hard drive, wherever there is room. This “fragmentation” of the information in a file can lead to a significant slow-down in file access times because the disk’s read/write head must move all over the disk, looking for the various portions of a file. Disk Defragmenter arranges the blocks of information for a file into adjacent blocks on your hard drive, which may significantly improve the file access times.

Answer 2

Think of your hard drive as a big round circle with information scattered all around it. When you ask the computer to do something, like find a document, the more scattered the information is on the hard drive, the harder the computer has to work to find it. Now, run defrag, and it puts all the bits and pieces back together, in the order in which the computer looks for them. There are certain files that belong at the start of the drive, files that belong in the middle and files that belong at the end. Defragging puts them all where they belong. Makes the computer run smoother and faster.

Now, use one of the best defrag programs I've ever seen, Auslogics Disk Defrag. It will do in half the time what Windows defrag will do. And unless you add and remove a lot of programs and files, defragging once a month should be enough.
http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/index.php

Answer 3

The action of defragmenting puts your files together.

When Windows writes a file to disk it sometimes scatters it here and there on the disk. In theory this made it harder to get the file since Windows would have to find all the pieces.

In practice benchmark testing doesn't show a speed improvement of a defragged disk over a fragmented one but I still think it's a good idea to defrag.

I think the action of reading and rewriting the file restores the magnetic field to full strength and reduces the chance of a corrupted file.

That is only my theory and isn't documented.

Answer 4

The disk defragmenter puts most of your files closer together so that the hdd doesn't have to search for a long time to find it. It speeds your computer up a whole buch sometimes. About every 2-4 weeks I would check to see if it needs to be defragmented (it will tell you if you analyze it).

Answer 5

Think of defrag as trying to read a book with the pages all nicely in order instead of with the pages tosed all over the room. Defrag puts the pages"files" together for you.

Answer 6

Run it ... the program will tell you whether you need to defragment. It can speed up some parts of your computer

Answer 7

..... if you use your computer a lot,.... your RAM and Hard Drive has to work as fast as it can to produce the file's and document's you require.... Sometime's under heavy use,.. it does'nt have enough time to return them in order, so just tosses them back anywhere, while it hurriedly look's for your next requested file.... After a while,. they're all mixed up, and pretty much out of order, inevitabley slowing your computer down.... De fragging them basically re-sort's them back into orderly block's,.. so that next time you need a file,..... it can get it for you fast.....

Answer 8

It's something like you sort all books on a book shelf
so it sort all files in your hard drive to make it tidy.

Answer 9

every week it deletes on wanted files and compresses the ones that havnt been acessed in awhile makes your preformance beter.

Answer 10

it organizes your files on your hard drive and all thoughoughout your computer.

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