Defragmentation - What Is It And Why?

There was a time when hard drives were small, and a 1GB drive was considered huge. By the way, not so long ago in the mid-90's. At that time on the defragmentation of disks, all the PC users known to me were just crazy. I believe that the unknowns were obsessed with me, too.

Now this operation is not given such importance. It's no joke - defragmentation of 1GB takes several minutes, and 1TB - hours. Not before. And hard drives are faster now. And yet, defragmentation is still relevant, and companies that provide computer help, all also sometimes put this service in the price lists. It would be nice to know what it is and why, is not it?

What is defragmentation?

In fact, on a physical level, defragmentation is moving the pieces that make up each file as close as possible to each other. Increased efficiency is achieved due to the fact that the disc head that reads data written to the disc makes fewer "idle" moves from one edge of the disk to the other to give you the entire file. In this case, let's note especially, defragmentation not only slows down the work, but also speeds up the wear and tear on your hard drive.

As you could understand, the files on the disk are not written in monolith, but in small pieces. They are broken so as to fit into the hard disk cells - clusters. Each cluster has the same size. Since you work with files - open, modify, save, then in due course, the initially located pieces of files, are scattered across clusters on the entire disk. Of course, this slows down the hard drive, so if fragmentation reaches about 70% - it's hard not to notice.

How to deal with defragmentation

All versions of Windows have their own defragmenter. Although you can use third-party solutions. Let's take a closer look at the work of the built-in utility, and leave the issue of considering defragmenters of other companies for another time.

To start the defragmenter just go to "my computer" and right-click on the desired partition of the hard drive. Find the property option in the context menu. Now open the service tab in the window that appears and click on the "Defragment" button. In a new window, the defragmenter window can be clicked on the defragment button. Now you have to wait until this process is completed.

By the way, this is not the only way to call the uninstaller program. You can go to Start, find the control panel menu, double-click on the administration button and choose computer management. In it, find the option "disk defragmentation". Select the disk or disks that you want to defragment and click the Defragment button.

A few tips on defragmentation:

• Do you want to reduce defragmentation time? Conduct it more often, at least once a month.
• Before you do the defragmentation, it is worth checking the disk. This is done in the service menu of the hard disk properties.
• During defragmentation it is advisable not to perform any operations on the defragmented disk. Then the defragmentation time will be shortened. Therefore, some people leave the disk defragmented for the night.

We wish you a hard drive for a long life and as few as possible calls to a computer service.