What Is Disk Defragmentation And What Does It Mean To You

By Author: DJP Hybrid
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All Windows file systems are vulnerable to fragmentation, regardless of the type of file system or the type of disk. When a volume contains many fragmented files and folders, it requires several additional disk drive reads and more movement of the disk drive heads to collect the various pieces, resulting in Windows taking much longer to read a file.

File fragmentation of the hard drive's file structure causes poor performance when a user starts the computer; cause it to react slowly when the user tries to open a file or application. It occurs on a daily basis. It will occur anytime a user writes a file. Similarly, creating new files and folders also takes longer when the free space available on the volume is scattered. The amount of fragmentation will depend on how much free space a user has on your hard drive. A hard drive that has very little open space will have a higher amount of file fragmentation than say an almost new drive. If the free space is not consolidated, then subsequent files written to the volume will more likely be fragmented.

When a file is saved to the hard drive it is written to what is called ...
... contiguous blocks. If the hard drive is low on space then the file system can not always write the file to contagious blocks. This causes the slow down in the system performance because the file system has to find empty block to write the file and when a user wants to open the file it has to go find all the blocks that the file was written to.
A user can use Disk Defragmenter to reduce fragmentation and improve the overall performance of disk input and output (disk I/O) of the hard drive. Disk Defragmenter is both a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in and a command-line utility that can be used to optimize NTFS- or FAT-formatted volumes. When a file is written to non-contiguous free space, it is known as a fragmented file. Running Disk Defragmenter on a volume after installing software organizes the clusters on the volume. Running Disk Defragmenter on a regular basis consolidates space to create more contiguous free clusters on the volume, which allows disk heads to read files and write updates more quickly.
To start the Disk Defragmenter go to Start/Programs/Accessories/System tools. A user may want to run the program in the 'Safe Mode', restart the system, press F8 when the Windows startup screen is displayed, and select 'Safe Mode' from the menu.

A user can use the built in Disk Defragmenter or one can purchase a third party product. Before a user starts the defragmentation, one should go to the temp folders and delete all the files there, they are useless unless the user has a program open and there is a file in the temp folder for the application to use until the user saves it. In case of warning messages like ‘Disk Cleanup', a user should delete the temp files before starting the defragmentation.

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