What good does defragmenting do?

Answer 1

I remember someone described it like this.
Imagine the movers unloaded their truck and just piled the stuff anywhere.
Now you need to find something...you have to look through everything.
Defragmenting puts the kitchen stuff away in the kitchen...the bathroom stuff away in the bathroom...the garage stuff away in the garage.
you get the picture.

Answer 2

David,
It is just as everybody sez: "defrag"-ing your hard drive does 1)put all your files in one easy-to-access location; 2)makes your hard drive live longer; 3)makes your computer's CPU not work so hard; but it also helps clean up SOME types of file signatures. Mind you, the sig's it cleans are only for those files you've UnInstalled, but...
Recently, I ran into this problem myself. I wanted to put a newer game on my computer, knew I had the space, but my comp wouldn't do it. I ran the disk Clean-Up, then the Defrag-er. Boom! all 6 gb of space I needed cleared up, and (BONUS!) some extra space, too.
If you have ever done spring cleaning, or just gotten rid of some old gear, or just organized your desk or closet or room, you'll see the similarity.
Hope this helps....

Answer 3

Reduces disc space used, increases access speeds to files as they are not split over the disc, increases disc life by reducing thrashing.

Here's an analogy.

You're building a house.

It's faster to build if you get all the materials together before you start, rather than having to heep disappearing off to get in mew supplies part way through the build.

That's what defragging does, puts all the parts of files together so that they can be used quicker.

Answer 4

1. Put your files where thay can run faster (it doesn't put them in a different folder, but virtually moves them).
2. Makes your computer faster.
3. Provides easy ways to keep things in good shape, but make sure you do a Disk Cleanup before a Disk Defragment.

Answer 5

It collects and rewrites your files contiguously. When you write a file to the hard disk, the system plunks it out there whereever it can find segments of free space, which is not good. So defragging kind of goes out and finds all those orphans and brings them into the house together.

Answer 6

Aside from making things run faster, the hard drive will not have to work so hard looking for all the bits and pieces of files. Less work for the read/write head. Extended hard drive life.

Answer 7

It speeds the computer up a little because all the bits and pieces of files are together and not spread all over the hard drive.

Answer 8

when you defrag a computer, it moves data around on the hard drive so the computer can access it faster. also it will free up some space on your computer.

!~Tim~!

Answer 9

When your computer stores a file in a hurry, it stores it in bits and pieces all over your HD, and keeps this all straight by storing the locations in a FAT (file allocation table). This causes the read-write head to have to seek all over the disk to put this file together.
Defragmenting puts these pieces in one location so that the read-write head finds it all and reads it.
Much quicker, and speeds up your computer.

Answer 10

It puts related files next to each other on your hard drive. The hard drive is the "bottleneck" of computer speed. So anything that speeds up access to data, makes the apparent speed of your pc improve.