What is Disk Fragmentation on Windows and how does it optimize your hard disk?
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It’s disk defragmentation, and it optimizes your hard disk by decreasing fragmentation.
Fragmentation happens naturally over time due to the way hard disks store files. The disk is divided into segments called clusters, that can hold a small chunk of data each, commonly 512 bytes to 4 kilobytes. When files are written, they’re stored in consecutive clusters that can be read quickly as the hard disk platter spins. When a file is deleted, its associated clusters are marked as free.
As more and more files are written, deleted, moved, change size and so on, the pattern of free clusters starts to resemble swiss cheese, and new files are put in the available holes because there are no long continuous sequences of free clusters anymore. This means the hard disk needs to jump around to collect all the different clusters spread across the platter, which is a lot slower.
Disk defragmentation is a sorting program which shuffles around the files between clusters until they can be made continuous again. This requires using the free space on the hard drive as temporary storage, so an almost full disk can take a very long time to defrag.
Most home computers today use a solid state drive (SSD) instead of a hard disk, at least for files where quick access is important. Those don’t have mechanical parts that need time to move into position when eading and writing, so they don’t benefit from being defragged. It is in fact detrimental to them, because writing data to them slowly wears them down, and defraggig entails a whole lot of writing.
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