After reading another post about why defragmentation isn’t as necessary with modern devices, i started wondering what exactly fragmentation even is. How and why does it happen and doesn’t it screw up your data?
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Data is arranged on a hard disk in concentric circles. To access another one of these circles, the disk drive has to move the magnetic head. This takes some length of time, which adds up if many such jumps are required.
Initially all files are written to a disk in a sequential fashion. One after another. Some files later get deleted and the space they took up is marked as free. When a new file is written, it may need to occupy several of these smaller gaps and now consists of disjoint segments. They are being kept track of in a table and can be reassembled, but this takes time.
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