Computers made simple: What does defragment mean and is it important?

One of the things I always stress to computer users is to make sure they keep their hard drive defragmented  (defrag).  I can’t tell you how often it it is cause of a slow computer.  Unfortunately, the average PC user seems to have never heard of defragmenting.

In this post, I shall explain (and simplify) what defragmentation is and why it is so crucial.

Lets start out with an imaginary (and very simplified) hard drive.  It contains 12 blocks of space with which to store programs.  It currently contains files 1 and 2, each taking up 3 blocks.

But lets say we delete file 1

Next we add a new file (3), this one is much bigger than file 1, it is 6 blocks long.  Notice, that in order to make room, it splits into 2 parts.  This is called a fragmented file.  It takes the computer much longer to find the 2 separate parts than to find a file that is in one piece.

But what if we take this a step farther and delete file 2.

Now we add another file (4).  This one is also 6 blocks long.  See, now both files are fragmented and the computer is running much slower….we should defrag…

There, the pieces have been moved around, and the computer can find the files much faster.

Now imagine the same thing, only with thousands of files covering millions of blocks, many of them broken into far more than 2 pieces.  See why deframenting your computer is so important?

See Also:  Defragmenting a Hard Dirve (XP)