What is Disk Fragmentation on Windows and how does it optimize your hard disk?
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A HDD is essentially a spinning metal platter and a magnetic arm that reads or writes data to the platter. You can think of it similar to a record (the platter) and needle (the arm) in a record player.
When you write data to the HDD, the platter’s surface is essentially what the data is written to. If you think of sectors as a physical dimension, then only a certain amount of data can be written to a small section of the platter.
When you delete stuff from your HDD, you essentially free up areas to be rewritten. Going back to the physical dimensions, this means there’s going to be “holes” or areas where there’s no real data. Depending on how the data gets written, it might fill some of those holes with new data. If the newer data is too big to fit in those holes, it will split part of the newer data with those locations and then place the excess in a different location.
For the most part that doesn’t seem like too big of a deal, and it’s not really when you consider the rest of the data might just be a few sectors over. However when the distance between sectors get too far apart or the data is spread throughout multiple spaced sectors, it takes more time for you to read the data. This is because the platter has to spin so that the arm can read part of the data, spin again to the next location and again until it reads all of the file.
Essentially disk defragging takes the data spread apart and rearranges them so that they’re next to each other in continuous sectors. You can think of the process similar to a bus route. If each pick up location was the next block from the last, you’d get to the next location quicker than if the next stop was two blocks down and then the last stop was 5 blocks.
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