What does it mean to defragment your hard drive?

Answer 1

This link will give you a very detailed explanation :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation

Answer 2

When you install and delete files from your computer, the hard drive scatters the files around the hard drive. When you defragment your hard drive it moves all your files into what is called Contiguous files, in essence, moving their location next to or in close proximity of the rest of their related files. This allows faster access to them for loading and storing. You should routinely defragment your hard drive to maintain efficiency and speed. Prior to defragmentation, you should run disk clean up to remove excess garbage files which will free up additional space on your hard drive. When you use disk cleanup, try to only clean the recycle bin, temporary files, and internet history, deleting some of the other stuff can cause instability if you accidentally delete the wrong stuff.

As a routine, I run Disk Clean up on the first of every month, and Defragment on the 15th. Depending on how much you store and delete, it may not actually have to defrag every month. I hope this helps.

Answer 3

file are put on your hard drive you use them some time when the are big the are put in a wide area that way they can fit but in doing this it takes the computer longer to find the files tha a program runs off of.

defragmenting will help to put those file were they need to be making your computer work faster and better.

you should do this about once every 2 weeks or so depending on how much stuff you download the more the more often to keep it working fast.

Answer 4

Imagine that every time you add or remove anything from your computer that it is like writing down or erasing things from a black and white notebook. Now imagine that your computer adds and removes things from itself for all sorts of reasons as you are using it throughout the day, so there is a lot of writing and erasing on that notebook.

Well eventually to save space you will have to put new stuff in the spaces where you erased old stuff. But what if the new thing you are writing is bigger than the space you erased from? Well your computer doesn't care, it will just put some of it in the first empty space and whatever's left over will be written to the next erased space, etc until it's all written down. It even leaves little notes like in a magazine "Continued on page 36"...

But now when you go to read the new stuff it takes longer because you have to skip around the pages rather than read them in order.

That's fragmentation.

Defragmenting your hard drive is like re-writing the notebook in order where all the realted things are together again so when you read it you don't have to skip around.

Answer 5

I agree with crankypants on the definition of defragment. The main reason defragmentation is important is caching. It basically means when you go to access a file, your computer will grab the bits next to it too. That way, it will run much faster because it wont need to keep accessing your hard disk.
And it doesn't cause unnecessary wear and tear. It actually saves your hard disk from wear because it makes it so the head doesn't need to go as far to access files(the files will be more likely to be nearby).

Answer 6

over time, as ur hard drive gets more use, ur files and programs become stored in different places on the drive, as opposed to being stored together in one file. this is fragmenting, and while it is perfectly normal, it makes ur computer run slower, and can wear out the drive over a few years. it causes the computer to look through the entire drive to find all pieces of a file or program. defragmenting is a process that tells the computer to locate all parts of a program or file, and put them together. it's best to do this every 3-6 months, for optimal performance.

Answer 7

For all intents and purposes, you're organising it. Files come in in little bits to put it simply, defragmenting moves the little bits and pieces together if possible. So when using that file, the computer doesn't have to search as long to find what it needs. Also, it frees up space that is unusable while your files are fragmented, and it can make your computer run faster.

Answer 8

Defragging puts all the files on your hard drive back together as continuous files and moves the importat files to the begining of the drive so they open faster.

Answer 9

if u defragment ur hard drive mean to do sth that the files on ur hard be cotiguse.then the speed of ur hard drive to acces files will be more.to do so u must go and right click on the drive u want.then choos propertise and in the second tab click on defragment.

Answer 10

when ur system access each file in ur hard drive, some parts of file get fragmented through out ur drive. When system tries to access the same file, it should search for the pieces of file, thats makes the system slower.
when you defragment ur hard drive all these fragmented pieces are collected and are placed at one location. It makes computer to access the whole file easy and faster. thats it

Hariharakumar
http://hariharakumar-blog.blogspot.com

Answer 11

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