Defragment And Fragmention Help?

Question

What is
Defragment and Frgment on Laptops Hard Drive, it says Defragment Drive ? what is this? someone tell me please/

Answer 1

When working with files, sometimes Windows divides the file information into pieces and stores them in different places on the hard drive. This is called fragmentation, and it is normal. In order for the computer to use a file, Windows must search for the pieces of the file and put them back together. This process slows the hard drive performance.

The Disk Defragmenter program organizes the data on the drive so that each file is stored as one unit rather than multiple pieces scattered across different areas of the drive. Defragmenting the information stored on the drive can improve hard drive performance.

While the Disk Defragmenter program is running, do not use your keyboard or mouse because using them may stop and restart the defragmenting process. Also, if you are connected to a network, log off before starting Disk Defragmenter. Network communication may stop the defragmentation process and cause it to start over.

To run Disk Defragmenter:

Double-click the My Computer icon. The My Computer window opens.

Right-click the hard drive that you want to defragment, then select Properties. The System Properties dialog box opens.

Click the Tools tab.

Click Defragment Now.

If Disk Defragmenter does not start automatically, click Start or Defragment.
Disk Defragmenter shows its progress on the screen. When finished, Disk Defragmenter asks if you want to quit the program.
If you want to defragment another drive, click No then follow the on-screen instructions.

Answer 2

I'll copy paste parts from an answer I had written to another similar question:

To understand defragmentation, we must first look at fragmentation.

Windows does not necessarily write all the files in a contiguous block to the disk. Instead, it may split up the file into pieces i.e 'fragments' and fit them where ever it finds free space first, ie. some fragments can be in between other files, while the rest are together in some other location on the disk etc.

Therfore, when reading the file, the drive has to do more work picking up these scattered fragments from all over the disk and it takes more time. Because of all this, overall system performance decreases and the PC slows down since the hardrive is usually the slowest component of the PC (it's mechanical) and fragmentation makes it even slower.
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DEFRAGMENTATION (de-'fragmentation') gathers up these file fragments and arranges them in order in a single block for each file. When it does this for the whole drive, it can take a long time to defrag if the drive is heavily fragmented.

The best solution for defeating fragmentation is automatic defragmentation which runs in the background. The software automatically analyzes the drive and defragments without bothering the user; but it does so in such a way that the user's computing activities are NOT interrupted. The defrag usually occurs during system idle time when there are sufficient free system resources to defrag.

The automatic defragmentation method is superior to outdated manual or scheduled defrags because it tries to keep fragmentation on the drives low, continuously. The user also has to do nothing once the software is installed and the automatic defrag enabled.

With scheduled defrag, after a few hours of usage, the drive become fragmented again and remains fragmented until the next defrag, so the benefits are short-lived with manual/scheduled defrag.

A defragmented drive improves system performance, reduces battery power consumption for laptops (less work for the drive, remember) and increases the harddrive life.

Answer 3

If you do a lot of deleting files off your computer, your computer can become defragmented.
Defragging is when your operating system, like Windows, places the bits of a file on your hard drive. Sometimes, when you have lots of files stored on your computer, Windows will place the same file in different places to make sure you can save it.
You can defragment your hard drive. You won’t hurt anything by doing it. But it can take a long time to do it. Best to do it before you go to bed at night and let it run. As a tip I would recommend turning off your Screensaver too. This will help the computer focus on one task.
Some benefits of doing it is quicker read and write times to your computer. You can open up a document or picture a little quicker. Most people won’t notice a change though.

Answer 4

Think of the hard drive on your laptop as a closet.
Everything in the closet must be stored in shoe boxes (all the same size-Windows calls them clusters).
Each item (file) must take up at least one shoe box (cluster). Larger items (progams like M$ Office, for instance) take up many shoe boxes (clusters). With me so far?
Okay. So you throw an item away (delete a file). The shoe box (cluster) where that item is stored is now empty (it's not really empty, but the index shows that it can be used again).
The issue of fragmentation comes up when you add new file or programs. The files are written to the first available clusters (empty shoe boxes) even if the shoe boxes aren't next to each other (called "contiguous" on a hard drive). Your computer then has to search all over the drive to gather the clusters containing the file or program you want to use, and that's not very efficient.
Defragging pulls all those clusters out of the way, arranges them so that the large files are placed close together (contiguously), which makes things more efficient.
Run the defragmenter in Windows XP by clicking start, all programs, accessories, system tools, disk defragmenter.
Be patient-it may take a while.

Answer 5

When files get stored on the HDD, they are sometimes spilt into fragments and scattered over the platter. In order to read them, the drive head goes from one fragment to another and reads them together. This ends up taking longer than if the files were not scattered and instead placed 'contiguously'. As fragmentation builds up, it slows down opening of files, programs and in severe cases its like a sickness which affects drive performance and speed. If the analysis says you need to defrag, it would be a good idea to do so. Defragmentation puts the scattered files fragments back together contiguously thus increasing file access speed. It prevents the drive from getting weary and exhausted trying to seek data.
If you are running it for the first time, it may take a while. be sure to follow instructions on a tutorial on how to do it the right way.

Answer 6

Defrag is a fancy way of saying "get organized".

Windows has the nasty habit of sticking files any where it can find free space. This forces the hard drive to work harder and slow down performance when you try to access those files.

Defrag is a utility to help Windows organize the files and place then where they should be, which in turn will help your system run faster.

Answer 7

Your hard drive is basically a disc that reads and writes magnetically. As it spins it picks up programs. Once the program is not being used it drops it in pieces to make room for the next one. A fragmented drive will have parts of a program scattered and will take longer to load. Defrag puts the programs back in order so that they load on fewer spins theu reducing your access time.

Answer 8

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.

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 increased (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 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 to gather data together in one area, before splitting a single partition into two or more partitions (for example, with GNU Parted, or PartitionMagic).

Defragmenting may help people to increase the life-span of the hard drive itself, by minimizing head movement and simplifying data access operations

Defragging the disk will not stop a system from malfunctioning or crashing because the filesystem is designed to work with fragmented files.[3] Since defrag cannot be run on a filesystem marked as dirty without first running chkdsk[4], a user who intends to run defrag "to fix a system acting strangely" often ends up running chkdsk, which repairs file system errors, the end result of which may mislead the user into thinking that defrag fixed the problem when it was actually fixed by chkdsk.

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. Additionally, file systems such as NTFS (and most Unix/Linux filesystems) are designed to decrease the likelihood of fragmentation.
Improvements in modern hard drives such as RAM cache, faster platter rotation speed, and greater data density reduce the negative impact of fragmentation on system performance to some degree, though increases in commonly used data quantities offset those benefits. However, modern systems profit enormously from the huge disk capacities currently available, since partially filled disks fragment much less than full disks. In any case, these limitations of defragmentation have led to design decisions in modern operating systems like Windows Vista to automatically defragment in a background process but not to attempt to defragment a volume 100% because doing so would only produce negligible performance gains.

Answer 9

It is more efficient for older operating system technology (which alas Windows is) to store blocks in continugous physical blocks on the disk.

Basically the degramentation process goes through your file system and re-arranges the blocks so that they're not scattered in the order that the OS found free blocks, but actually take up physically adjacent blocks.

Answer 10

when you write files to a disk and then delete or update them the files end up being split or in different places on the hard drive - the more this happens the longer it take for your hard drive to get all the info it needs.

Defrag tries to move all the files back together again which makes the hard drive quicker

see for a more techy version
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation