What is Disk Fragmentation on Windows and how does it optimize your hard disk?
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This doesn’t apply to newer solid state drives, but rather the slightly older spinning-disk style hard drives.
With the spinning disks, there is a seeker head, like the needle on a record player, that has to physically go to the location on the disk where the relevant bit of information is stored. If all those bits are right in a row on the disk, this is a very quick operation.
However, it can happen that those bits get scattered all over the physical platter, so that the seeker head has to travel to many different places on the disk. That’s called fragmentation, and it makes it take many times longer to read a file.
Defragmenting a disk is the process of taking all those fragmented files, and rewriting them so they’re in nice rows on the disk again.
It mostly doesn’t matter these days though, even if you don’t have an SSD, modern operating systems do a good job of not fragmenting drives too badly. This is mostly something we worried about back in the Windows 98 era and before.
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