What is Disk Fragmentation on Windows and how does it optimize your hard disk?
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Imagine your hard disk was just a lot of empty spots to put blocks in. You have 5 yellow blocks, 5 blue blocks, and 5 red blocks filled in which are your files
If you take out the 5 blue blocks (delete a file) you now have 5 yellow, 5 empty spots and 5 red blocks
Say you want to add 10 black blocks, it would fill up the 5 blank and put the other 5 at the end. Your hard disk is now fragmented and if you want to collect all the black blocks your computer needs to collect it from two (or more) seperate areas.
Defragmentation just puts them all together so it would be 5 yellow , 10 black, 5 red.
On old “spinning disk” hard drives, a fragmented drive adds time as the head physically has to move to each area to read the data. A solid state drive does not have this issue and in fact, you should not defragment a solid state drive as they have limited write amounts (still ALOT) so you’re writing blocks with no benefit
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