Many data storage mediums historically involve the movement of a head…think of it like a record player: if you want to change songs, it takes time to move the needle to a new location
Hard drives with a rotating disk and a movable head are similar. They work most efficiently if all the data in a file (track on a record) are in an consecutive sequence.
Disk fragmentation is when this breaks down. Imagine a record that is full of music, but bits of songs are jumbled up. You would need to move the needle around a lot to keep the same song playing.
Defragmentation fixes this; the data (tracks) are reorganized such that related data is on the same track. This makes it unnecessary for the head to move around when reading data.
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