Defragment Your Hard Disk — You may have heard of the term ‘defragging’, which means defragmentation of data on a hard disk or another disk drive. If you are unfamiliar with the term and the procedure involved, read on to see if you should defragment your computer.

Your computer stores all your data on a hard disk drive. ‘Data’ means all the programs you have installed on your computer, as well as all the files you have saved. A disk drive is arranged into what are called sectors. Each sector can store a certain amount of data. If a file is larger than the storage space available in a single sector, it must be split up and saved into different sectors on the drive.

How To Know If You Should Defragment Your Hard Disk

If a disk drive has a lot of free space, your files will likely be saved contiguously. This means that sectors next to each other on the disk are used to save the file. On the other hand, if a disk drive is beginning to fill up, or if a very large file is being saved, it may become necessary to write data here and there on the disk, using sectors that are not physically next to or even near each other.

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Normally this is not too much of a problem, but when a file is very fragmented (i.e. consisting of large numbers of file fragments that make up the entire file) it will take considerably longer to open the file. This is because the hard disk read/write head has to move about to different parts of the disk surface in order to retrieve the various fragments that make up the file.

what is disk defragmentation?

Defragmentation is a procedure that rearranges the order of data on a disk drive. As far as possible it rearranges fragmented files into contiguous ones, which means that sectors that are physically next to each other are used to store the various portions of a file.

What Does Defragment Do?

Defragmentation can improve the performance of your computer since it results in files being loaded much more quickly than before. On the other hand, defragmenting a drive very frequently can increase wear and tear on the disk. Until about ten years ago it was common to defragment quite often since hard disks had much less capacity than they do now. In recent years this has become less of a problem,

Do I still Need to Defragment Your Computer?

so before defragmenting your drive you should check to see if it is necessary or not?

On a Windows computer, navigate to the Control Panel and select ‘Administrative Tools’. Then select ‘Computer Management. Under ‘Storage’, select ‘Disk Defragmenter’.

Click on the drive you want to check and select ‘Analyze’. The tool will advise you whether defragmentation is recommended or not. If you wish to proceed with defragmentation you should note that it may well take several hours to complete.

 Here is a video on How To Know If You Should Defragment Your Hard Disk

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