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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When we remove files from the disk, we leave holes where those files were. When the next file comes in, and it’s larger than that hole, we fill in as much of it as we can into that hole, then leave note at the end saying “rest of it is over in X”, where we put rest of the file. For larger files (or smaller holes), we can end up splitting the file into several different pieces (fragments – fragmentation). Since going between disk locations is costly (less so now than it was before), every time we read one of those split files, it takes us a longer time than if they were all neatly put together.
As a side-note, those little notes we leave for “rest of it is over in X” still take space, and given enough splitting, might actually have a noticeable effect on how much of your disk you can use.
De-fragmantation is re-organizing the disk so files are made continuous again.
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