File Fragmentation - Reasons Why It Is a Problem and How to Correct It

Oct 5
08:19

2009

Taylor Allin

Taylor Allin

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If your computer is running slower as of late there are quite a few things that could be the cause of the situation. One likely contender for being th...

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If your computer is running slower as of late there are quite a few things that could be the cause of the situation. One likely contender for being the culprit of your pc slowness is file fragmentation. File fragmentation can take place on any system,File Fragmentation - Reasons Why It Is a Problem and How to Correct It Articles it is not a signal of poor hardware or bad programming or any human errors. This file fragmentation comes about as a consequence of simple physics. It is something that should be dealt with occasionally as it takes a while to accumulate, so once every six months or so should be adequate for defragmenting your hard drive. In this article I am going to clarify what exactly file fragmentation is, why it comes about, and what you can do to correct it.

What is file fragmentation? The response to that query requires a bit of clarification. There is no simple answer. For those of you who remember vinyl albums, those are excellent physical depictions of the logical set up of a hard drive. The disc of the hard drive is round and it has a succesion of concentric circles. Each of those rings is seperated into sectors and each of those segments can hold a specific amount of data. When your pc saves information on your hard disk the data cannot overlap segments. So that when information is bigger than what can fit in one sector the data is broken into two separate pieces. Ideally those two separate pieces would then be placed into adjacent sectors of the hard drive. In that instance the information would still not be fragmented. Occasionally however there are not enough adjacent segments on the hard disk to store a full set of data and so one portion of the information has to be stored in an entirely separate area of the hard drive. Now you have fragmented data. It's not a drastic concern but it does contribute to the amount of time required to retrieve the data next time you want use it.

The reasons why data cannot always be stored in adjacent sectors of the hard disk are pretty simple and easy to comprehend. The adjacent sectors already contain data from other programs or files. The more programs you have installed and the number of times that you install and uninstall different programs adds to the amount of fragmentation on your hard disk. The resolution is fairly simple though. We simply need to use a drive defragmentation utility.

The tool that I highly recommend using for defragmenting a Windows based pc is smart defrag. Do a Google search for Smart defrag, download it, and install it. This program is very simple and easy to use but it will take some time so be prepared to start the program and then walk away for an hour or so while it does its work.