What is Disk Fragmentation on Windows and how does it optimize your hard disk?
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A hard disk is well, a disk, much like a gramophone. It spins, there are mechanically moving read heads and each location on the disk has some data.
So it matters where the data physically is on the disk, if the read head has to physically seek between many different places to read all parts of the file, it’s going to take much longer than reading it sequentially from a single place.
Now how and why would a file get written some parts here, some parts there? If you start with empty hard drive, it wouldn’t, it would just start from beginning and write however many files you want to write sequentially. But the drive gets full, what do you do? You delete some files you don’t need. Leaving behind chunks of unused space, size of the files that used to be there. Now you want to write a file and you do have enough empty space total for it, but none of the empty chunks are individually large enough to fit it, what to do? Easy, opsystem writes some parts in one empty chunk, some in next etc etc.
Over time between deleting old and writing new files it becomes more and more of a mess until eventually using the hard drive becomes unbearably slow.
To combat that is defragmentation procedure. What it does is move around where the files are located to create continuous free regions and brings the files that are separated in parts together into larger chunks.
All this is of course only relevant if you have physically moving media like in a hard drive. In case of SSD, fragmentation doesn’t really matter and trying to defragment would be counterproductive as SSD has limited lifetime of write cycles.
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