What is Disk Fragmentation on Windows and how does it optimize your hard disk?
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Basically, imagine the layout of the desktop and folders you can see in your computer as if they were real physical papers. Imagine how tiring and time consuming it’d be to move them all around to different places!
Now, what if instead of moving papers around constantly among a thousand different filing cabinets, you usually kept files in whatever cabinet you first put them in, and just kept a filing cabinet purely for keeping track of what goes where. Kind of like the Index in a book. Now you can change where a paper is “located” quickly, or you can mark that you don’t care about a paper any more and it’s okay to throw it away if you need more space, while hardly having to do any work at all!
The only problem is, as you do this more and more, especially with many small different papers, you might have to split up where you place some of them even though you’ll still act like they’re in one group in your little “Index”.
Eventually, you’ll be running all around your warehouse of filing cabinets just to do a simple task. This is why you might have to Defragment a disk drive, it’s a little like deciding to organize everything more efficiently, and try to place a lot of empty cabinets all in one place so it’s easier to place new papers there in the future.
Non ELI5 note: This only strictly applies to HDDs (Hard Drives with physical spinning discs). I believe many SSDs (Solid State Drives, with no moving parts) don’t really work this way in a way the system handles, as that would probably result in unnecessary read/write operations which reduce their lifespan? But strongly prefacing that I don’t know as much for SSDs in this case, so take that comment with a healthy fistful of salt.
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