What is Disk Fragmentation on Windows and how does it optimize your hard disk?
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#ELI5
I have a jigsaw puzzle that contains 30 pieces.
I give every piece to a different family.
Your job, is to collect the pieces and assemble the puzzle.
Which is going to be an easier job?
* I go down the street, one by one, and every house gets a piece. Just give out a piece, go next door, give out the next piece, go next door, etc.
* I give one piece to a family on Cedar Street, then I drive four streets over and give another piece to a family on 5th Ave, and then I drive over another two streets and give a piece to a family on Maple Terrace.
Which system is easier for you to collect all the jigsaw pieces?
“Why the heck would you drive all over town to give out these pieces?” Well, some families don’t want to participate in this exercise, they refuse a piece. And other families aren’t home at the time, so I have to skip their house. And one house has a nasty dog in the yard, so I skipped that house.
I really wanted to just go right down the street and give a piece out at every house … but I couldn’t do that. So now the jigsaw is scattered all over town.
**It’s kind of the same on your hard drive.** You get a funny image from your grandma. You want to keep it on your computer. Your computer needs to find 20 “spots” to store the 20 parts of that image.
The computer would love to store the 20 parts all next to each other … but some spots are already occupied, and other spots have been marked as “faulty”, and the end result is that your single image, is stored in 20 different spots all over the hard drive.
That’s a lot harder to reassemble your image, than if they were all stored right next to each other.
Make sense?
**So what does defragmentation do?**
It’s like the Mayor telling everyone in town, “Everybody, if you have a piece of Undead_Necromancer’s puzzle, you have to move over to Water Street. Yep, everyone. And nobody’s allowed to live on Water Street unless they have a piece of the puzzle.”
But … oh my … there are already people living on Water Street. What do we do? Well, we force *those* people to move too, to make room for everyone we want to live on Water Street.
So the computer finds all the parts of your image, and it tries to put all the parts in the same general place. But to do that, you have to move OTHER things out of the way. And this repeats until all the parts to all the images are each stored next to each other.
But that is a LONG process! Every time you have to move something out of a spot (to make room), now you have to find a new spot for that piece too.
So you see that, defragmentation may take a long time, but the end result is that it’s easier to find all the parts of files.
**So it’s good, right?**
Nah, not really. Several reasons:
* Computers are already really good at finding all the parts, even if they’re scattered all over town. It’s just not a chore for a computer anymore.
* Newer technologies do away with hard drives altogether, and inside your computer is something like a big flash drive (no moving parts). So those new technologies make it even easier to reassemble all the parts.
* As soon as your entire hard drive is defragmented … now grandma sends another image to you. And the computer may not have 20 consecutive spots left to store it. So here we go again!
#ELI5
I have a jigsaw puzzle that contains 30 pieces.
I give every piece to a different family.
Your job, is to collect the pieces and assemble the puzzle.
Which is going to be an easier job?
* I go down the street, one by one, and every house gets a piece. Just give out a piece, go next door, give out the next piece, go next door, etc.
* I give one piece to a family on Cedar Street, then I drive four streets over and give another piece to a family on 5th Ave, and then I drive over another two streets and give a piece to a family on Maple Terrace.
Which system is easier for you to collect all the jigsaw pieces?
“Why the heck would you drive all over town to give out these pieces?” Well, some families don’t want to participate in this exercise, they refuse a piece. And other families aren’t home at the time, so I have to skip their house. And one house has a nasty dog in the yard, so I skipped that house.
I really wanted to just go right down the street and give a piece out at every house … but I couldn’t do that. So now the jigsaw is scattered all over town.
**It’s kind of the same on your hard drive.** You get a funny image from your grandma. You want to keep it on your computer. Your computer needs to find 20 “spots” to store the 20 parts of that image.
The computer would love to store the 20 parts all next to each other … but some spots are already occupied, and other spots have been marked as “faulty”, and the end result is that your single image, is stored in 20 different spots all over the hard drive.
That’s a lot harder to reassemble your image, than if they were all stored right next to each other.
Make sense?
**So what does defragmentation do?**
It’s like the Mayor telling everyone in town, “Everybody, if you have a piece of Undead_Necromancer’s puzzle, you have to move over to Water Street. Yep, everyone. And nobody’s allowed to live on Water Street unless they have a piece of the puzzle.”
But … oh my … there are already people living on Water Street. What do we do? Well, we force *those* people to move too, to make room for everyone we want to live on Water Street.
So the computer finds all the parts of your image, and it tries to put all the parts in the same general place. But to do that, you have to move OTHER things out of the way. And this repeats until all the parts to all the images are each stored next to each other.
But that is a LONG process! Every time you have to move something out of a spot (to make room), now you have to find a new spot for that piece too.
So you see that, defragmentation may take a long time, but the end result is that it’s easier to find all the parts of files.
**So it’s good, right?**
Nah, not really. Several reasons:
* Computers are already really good at finding all the parts, even if they’re scattered all over town. It’s just not a chore for a computer anymore.
* Newer technologies do away with hard drives altogether, and inside your computer is something like a big flash drive (no moving parts). So those new technologies make it even easier to reassemble all the parts.
* As soon as your entire hard drive is defragmented … now grandma sends another image to you. And the computer may not have 20 consecutive spots left to store it. So here we go again!
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