What is Disk Fragmentation on Windows and how does it optimize your hard disk?

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What is Disk Fragmentation on Windows and how does it optimize your hard disk?

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If you add a file to your computer, it will be saved on the hard drive. Most of the time, the file is saved as one continuous block of data. Over time, with new files getting added and deleted, a file might get split up into multiple blocks in your hard drive. If you now want to read and use that file, the computer has to find each block of the file, before it can use it. Obviously it is much faster to find just one block than to find multiple, so if your file is scatters all over the hard drive, stuff takes longer to load.

Windows (and the other operating systems probably as well) can optimise your hard disk by looking for each block of a file, and putting them back together in one block. On earlier versions you had to initiate this process manually, nowadays it gets automatically done in the background

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