What is fragmentation

#832 | 4:06 |

Tutorials

Friday October 29, 2010

When your

computer writes data

to the hard drive, the data is sometimes written out of order, or fragmented. In order to

speed up your hard drive

, you can do something called

defragmenting your hard drive

. We'll explain both

fragmentation and defragmentation

in this episode.

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Show Notes

- When a program is written to a fresh, clean hard drive, the entire program is laid down in one contiguous piece.

- As more and more programs are installed, deleted and added, it's no longer possible to keep like segments together.

- Newly installed programs begin using the first available slot, which may or may not hold the entire program.

- If a program or set of files cannot be stored in one place, then the rest is stored in other places on the drive.

- In this way, a program becomes broken into fragments rather than being one continuous section.

- This fragmentation makes your hard drive work harder and take longer to find files.

- The hard drive head has to move all around a drive in order to access all the parts or fragments of a single program or file.

- This slows down data retrieval.

- The hard disk needs to be defragmented so programs can be rewritten to disk so they are contiguous.

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