What is Defragging?
Defragging is process done to a hard disk in order to improve performance and recover some lost disk space. Defragging is an necessary part of a PC’s upkeep as it keeps all the data on your hard disk in an easily readable order. If a hard disk is left without defragging, then over time the disk will start to lose performance and also slow reduce the available capacity to data. As you will be aware if your hard disk is running slow then this will affect the rest of the system performance, in all applications and especially in games, where frame rate is important.
How does Defragging improve performance?
When you defrag your hard disk you re-arrange the order in which the data is stored on the drive. The Computer will arrange the data so that data that belongs together and needs to be read together is in reality put in the same place on the drive. The obvious question here is why doesn’t the Computer store the data in the correct way in the 1st place? In an best situation (such as a blank disk) the Computer would do these as a 1st option. However with the amount of data being deleted and wrote to the disk all 2nd the Computer is on it is no wonder that the data can’t be stored together.
Lets have a look at an example. State you write three files to a disk all 10Mb in size the data would be all in a line all 10mb block after the other. This is how your Computer would like to store the data for maximum performance. It stands to reason that this is how you would like it to be stored as well if you wanted to search for the data. But today lets say that you determine to delete the middle file as its no longer any use to you. You today have a gap inbetween your files.
Lets say this time you write a file of 15mb in size. This file will be written in the 1st 10Mb of space and the remaining 5Mb added to the backend of the free space.As you can envision with the millions of files being written to and deleted from the disk all day, not to mention the temporary files that windows uses on a frequent foundation its not hard to envision the say in which your hard disk can be in after months of use. After a defrag in this easy example your Computer would re-arrange the disk to look as follows.
When files or indeed groups of files that belong together are stores next to all other the Computer has a much easier time locating the data plus the disk heads do not have to travel to different parts of the disk to retrieve the data required. This of course speeds up the disks performance and so in turn increases overall system performance. There are of course levels of performance gains. It becomes more negligible as you move to faster hard disks with massive memory buffers to compensate for file fragmentation however I would not ignore the problem of fragmentation, it doesn’t take much effort to defrag your disk today and then
How does defragging increase disk space?
Simply put defragging doesn’t really create any free space on your hard disk. It might appear when you look at the graphics that defrag programs show you, that the disk looks like it has more space, but all you are doing is moving data about not removing any. Any disk space gain is negligible and is caused when the defrag program puts together half clusters of data. Clusters can hold a number of files, but if not filled the next file is started at the next cluster. If a file is broken into pieces around the disk and defrag can put the file back into a single cluster, or merely save a cluster somewhere a small amount of space will be released.
Advanced Defragging
Some defragging software can go a tiny beyond merely sorting your files so they are all together. Programs such as Norton Speed Disk can also sort your whole sets of files and programs into the order that they are used. For example it can be set so that your windows swap file is at the fastest part of the disk, followed by games and most used applications which also require the fastest part of the hard disk., Then documents etc and rarely used application can be put to the back of the disk., This gives the priority speed access to the applications that require it most. Again this might only be a small increase in performance but all tiny helps.
Software to use for Defragging
You will be pleased to know that Windows comes with an sufficient defrag program which everyone can use. There are also some other pieces of software out there for a more particular use. Norton Speed disk is 1 option on the market which comes as part of Norton Utilities and Norton Systemworks. Doing a search on Defrag software on your favourite search engine will give you some options of free to use and pay for software.
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