Can someone explain to me what the Disk Defragment does for the PC?

Answer 1

Hi Nikki,

Defragmenting puts all the bit and pieces of files together.

When your computer writes a file it scatters it all over the hard drive wherever it finds available space. As files are deleted this space opens up and more files are scattered in the places left open and on and on.

In theory defragmenting will speed up access since the file is in a single place hence your computer will run better & faster. Benchmark testing has not proven that to be true. There is no speed gain measureable after defragmenting a very badly fragmented hard drive.

I still do it for my own personal theory is that by gathering up the scattered bits and pieces of a file and writing it in a new location you are renewing the magnetic strength of the file and reducing the chance it will become corrupt. My theory hasn't been proven either..

Norm

Answer 2

Hard drives work on the Fit It Wherever policy. That means that when you are adding to files (like adding something to a journal or updating a spreadsheet) it's stored on the hard disk wherever there's room. Then a tag is attached telling the PC where to find the rest of the stuff that was added to the file. This stuff is called fragments. Disk Defrag moves all the orphan bits & pieces around, so that they're in more of the same spots. This makes it easier & quicker - like when you're loading something in Word, and it has to reload when you advance past a certain spot. There really isn't a "performance" gain, just makes getting things that you add to over and over again to work a little more smoothly, IMO @ least =)

Answer 3

A file could be scattered within a hard drive and the computer put the pieces back together only when needed, this process is slowing a computer down and taking up extra disk space, defragment was just as above said, and elimination of those issues.

Answer 4

Every day your PC is in use, files are being written and erased from your hard drive. Over the space of days, months and years, your hard drive becomes fragmented. The performance benefits to disk defragmentation can be enormous. We have observed real life systems with files that have as many as 10,000 fragments! In these cases, your hard drive begins thrashing and the time to read a file increases by over a hundred times.

We also discovered that one of the biggest contributors to disk fragmentation is Windows Restore Points. Each and every day, Windows writes and erases Restore Points to your hard drive. Although this provides a fail safe, it also degrades system performance each and every day. Furthermore, Windows does not defragment its own restore points.


Our analyzer takes a good look at the most fragmented files on your system. Our research indicates that aside from Windows Restore Points, web browsing (Internet Explorer and Firefox) and email (Outlook and Thunderbird) are the heaviest contributors to disk fragmentation. If you use these applications on a regular basis, your system is even more susceptible to disk fragmentation. Lastly, although it is tempting, never read email or browse the web while doing a disk defragmentation. It is defeating the purpose.


Our free analysis gives the straight scoop on disk fragmentation and system performance.
To maximize the performance improvement from disk defragmentation, one must do more than run a disk defragger on a semi periodic basis. Routine system maintenance as listed below should always be done BEFORE a defrag, and never after.

clearing internet cache
deleting temporary files
deleting junk mail
removing seldom used programs
and so on
Disk MD will walk you through each step to squeeze the most performance out of your system. Also, we cannot stress enough the importance of closing all applications during the disk defragmentation.
PC Pitstop has helped millions of computer users through its free and automated diagnostics. Through these millions of interactions, PC Pitstop has developed best-of-breed applications such as Optimize, Erase, and Exterminate. Disk MD continues the tradition.

Answer 5

When you put files on a hard drive, and modify them (which changes their size), move, and rearrange them - you leave little bits of hard drive space behind that don't get released back into free space.

Defragging is kind of like when you fill a bag with leaves, and then push down on it to squish them down and get all of the air space out - so you can put more leaves in it.

You will usually notice an increase in performance after running defrag, but there are other things that you should usually do first if you are having performance problems.

Answer 6

Defrag re-aligns files and folders into a more organized order, allowing faster access and preventing data loss. An example would be re-organizing a file cabinet where all the files are scattered randomly into a easy to search system alphabetically.

Answer 7

make terms easy, it rearranges files so harddrive can find files easy, depending on how active you are installing programs you should defrag about once a month

Answer 8

ok, a million o a million right here, you may freely drag any docs, or photos, song, to a separet force.ANY utility you put in ahse to be reinstalled to the different force, different smart you will on no account be waiting to apply it. no longer something interior the abode windows classes could be moved in any respect. person-friendly situation is to easily reinstall some classes on the backup force, and get entry to it once you would be able to desire to, positioned a short decrease on table suitable to ease going into the force.

Answer 9

it basically collects the data which is scattered in the memory and puts it closer to increase the efficiency of operating system.

Answer 10

In the context of administering computer systems, defragmentation (or defragging) is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation in file systems. It does this by physically reorganizing the contents of the disk in order to store the pieces of each file close together and in order (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.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Aims of defragmentation
* 2 Causes and cures
* 3 Defragmentation issues
* 4 Myths
* 5 Utilities
* 6 Filesystems
* 7 References
o 7.1 Notes

[edit] Aims of defragmentation

Reading and writing data on a heavily fragmented file system is slowed down as the time needed for the disk heads to move between fragments, and waiting for the disk platter to rotate into position, is often fatal to throughput (see seek time and rotational delay). For many common operations, the performance bottleneck of the entire computer is the hard disk; thus the desire to process more efficiently encourages defragmentation. Operating system vendors often recommend periodic defragmentation in order to keep disk access speed from degrading over time.

Fragmented data also spreads over more of the disk than it needs to. Thus one may defragment in order to compact data storage before splitting a single partition into two or more partitions (for example, with GNU Parted, or PartitionMagic).

With the increasing total size of disk drives, defragmenting may help to increase the life-span of the hard drive its self. On drives in excess of 200GB, the workload of the drive head to span that much volume could be drastically reduced by defragmenting the drive. As such the overall lifespan of the drive can be increased. [1] [2]

[edit] Causes and cures

Fragmentation occurs when the operating system cannot or will not allocate enough contiguous space to store a complete file as a unit, but instead puts parts of it in gaps between other files (usually those gaps exist because they formerly held a file that the operating system has subsequently deleted or because the operating system allocated excess space for the file in the first place). As advances in technology bring larger disk drives, the performance loss due to fragmentation squares with each doubling of the size of the drive.[citation needed] Larger files and greater numbers of files also contribute to fragmentation and consequent performance loss. Defragmentation attempts to alleviate these problems.

A defragmentation program must move files around within the free space available in order to undo fragmentation. This is a memory intensive operation and cannot be performed on a file system with no free space. The reorganization involved in defragmentation does not change logical location of the files (defined as their location within the directory structure).

Another common strategy to optimize defragmentation and to reduce the impact of fragmentation is to partition the hard disk(s) in a way that separates partitions of the file system that experience many more reads than writes from the more volatile zones where files are created and deleted frequently. In Microsoft Windows, the contents of directories such as "\Program Files" or "\Windows" are modified far less frequently than they are read. The directories that contain the users' profiles are modified constantly (especially with the Temp directory and Internet Explorer cache creating thousands of files that are deleted in a few days). If files from user profiles are held on a dedicated partition (as is commonly done on UNIX systems), the defragmenter runs better since it does not need to deal with all the static files from other directories. For partitions with relatively little write activity, defragmentation performance greatly improves after the first defragmentation, since the defragmenter will need to defrag only a small number of new files in the future.

[edit] Defragmentation issues

The presence of immovable system files (or of files that the defragmenter will not move in order to simplify its task), especially a swap file, can impede defragmentation. These files can be safely moved when the operating system is not in use. For example, ntfsresize moves these files in order to resize an NTFS partition.

On systems without fragmentation resistance, fragmentation builds upon itself when left unhandled, so periodic defragmentation is necessary to keep disk performance at peak and avoid the excess overhead of less frequent defragmentation.

[edit] Myths
This section does not adequately cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
This article has been tagged since March 2007.

Many Windows users believe that frequent defragmentation is necessary to maintain adequate system performance. Although it may produce substantial filesystem speed improvements in some cases, for the typical Windows user the overall performance improvement may be minor or unnoticeable. Unless the operating system is malfunctioning, it should not be necessary to defrag to keep the system from crashing; the filesystem is designed to work with fragmented files. In fact, in a modern multi-user operating system, an ordinary user cannot defragment the system disks since superuser access is required to move system files.

[edit] Utilities
A screenshot of Windows Disk Defragmenter in Windows Vista.
A screenshot of Windows Disk Defragmenter in Windows Vista.

Defragmentation programs often come bundled with an operating system (although Windows NT notably did not include one). Perhaps the best-known defragmentation utility is Windows Disk Defragmenter, which is currently based on an old version of Diskeeper.

Defragmentation utilities:

* Diskeeper
* Windows Disk Defragmenter
* PerfectDisk
* O&O Defrag
* mst Defrag
* UltimateDefrag
* PageDefrag: Runs at startup and attempts to defragment system files that cannot be defragmented while they are in use.
* Contig: A command-line based defragmentation utility.
* Auslogics: A free defragmentation program for NTFS.
* JkDefrag: A free (GPLed) disk defragment and optimize utility for Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista.

[edit] Filesystems

* FAT DOS 6.x and Windows 9x-systems come with a defragmentation utility called Defrag. The DOS version is a limited version of Norton SpeedDisk.
* NTFS Windows 2000 and newer include an online defragmentation tool based on Diskeeper. NT 4 and below do not have built-in defragmentation utilities.
* ext2 uses an offline defragmenter called e2defrag, which does not work with its successor ext3, unless the ext3 filesystem is temporarily down-graded to ext2.
* JFS has a defragfs utility on IBM operating systems.
* HFS Plus in 1998 introduced a number of optimizations to the allocation algorithms in an attempt to defragment files while they're being accessed without a separate defragmenter.
* XFS provides an online defragmentation utility called xfs_fsr.

[edit] References

* Jensen, Craig (1994). Fragmentation: The Condition, the Cause, the Cure. Executive Software International. ISBN 0-9640049-0-9.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ http://www.diskeeper.com/defrag/stability-white-paper.asp
2. ^ http://www.envision.ca/templates/resources.asp?ID=1995

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation"

Categories: Articles to be merged since January 2007 | Articles with unsourced statements since January 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles lacking sources from March 2007 | All articles lacking sources | Rotating disc computer storage media | Computer storage devices
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