In fact, that’s what a defragmenting tool spends most of its time doing: moving files around on the disk to make room so other files can be laid out in order. In order for the sectors of one file to be arranged in order, other files or fragments of files may have to be moved out of the way to make room. Now, unlike the pages of a book strewn about your home, disk sectors are a little more limited in how they can be laid out. In a perfectly defragmented disk, the sectors of each file would be in an orderly sequence one right after the other, just like the pages in a book. Defragmentationĭefragmentation is nothing more than arranging all the pages/sectors together in order so they’re close to each other. The result is that when you access the file, Windows has to race all over the disk to retrieve the whole thing. The sectors 1 that make up the file are scattered all over the disk. In order to read your book in order, you’re racing around the house because the pages are scattered all over. You have a list of where each page is, so when you want to read your book, you go find page 1, then consult the list for page 2’s location and go find it, look up page 3, go find it, and so on and so on. Imagine the pages of your book are randomly scattered throughout your house. To your computer, however, a file is a lot more like a bunch of pages in a book that it has to keep track of individually. You open it, you work on it, you save it. To you and me, a file on your disk is a single thing. If you’re running Windows 7 or later, or you have SSDs, you do not need to defrag manually.Fragmentation is a side effect of normal disk usage, including file creation, growth, and deletion.Defragmentation refers to the process of rearranging the files on disk so that all data is adjoined.

Information that seems logically connected to us might be scattered across a hard disk. Fragmentation refers to the physical layout of data on a hard disk.

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