What mechanism is used for it? How does it work?
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imagine you have a notebook that is blank
when you want to save something in it, you write it down in the first available place. At the same time, you create a table of contents so you can quickly reference it.
This is all fine until you fill up the entire notebook. What do you do? You find some older entry that is no longer needed, so you delete it. At the same time, deleting the table of contents reference of it. Afterwards, you see there is a blank space there, so you write new information into it’s space. Since it’s a limited amount of space, you need to ensure that info you’re writing is smaller, so it can fit. therefore, there is left over blank space… so you make sure the table of contents also reflects this small amount of blank space.
do this a few thousand times and you will have a few thousand slivers of blank spaces. Too small to fit an entire entry into it, but all together it equates a whole entire page worth of blank space. Instead of just wasting that space, you decide you will use it.
you break up your new information that you wish to record so that you fill in each space to it’s max, jumping from page to page, to use each sliver, for just a single letter of multiple words that make up the entire sentence. You use the table of contents to record that all these incomplete entries are actually all part of a full entry.
Do this a few thousand times, the deleting, filling, and using the fragments of slivers to save info, and you will have a notepad of fragmented data but is perfectly recorded/organized int he table of contents.
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in a computer, it’s the same way, but instead of words and phrases, you have 1’s & 0’s to represent data and you have File Systems that manages the disk space.
what i just described is for Hard Disk Drives that saves data to disks… but that’s the same basic concept that is used to write to magnetic tape reels (think early computers) and Solid State Drives (SSDs) but with electric pulses and transistors.
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