Demystifying Defragmentation

Posted: December 2nd, 2011

If you’re like many computer users, you’ve probably heard of defragmentations, commonly shortened to defrags, before. You may even have delved into the depths of your computer’s settings and options and figured out how to perform one yourself. Yet even if you’re one of those people, chances are you don’t really know what a defrag does, and how it accomplishes that feat.

To understand defragmenting, you should probably know what fragmenting means. After all, you can’t defrag something if it hasn’t already been fragged. Well as the name would suggest, fragmenting is when certain files or installed programs are broken up into smaller chunks and stored in separate areas on your hard drive.

Some programs will do this automatically, while for other programs or files, this occurs unintentionally, as a result of there not being enough contiguous space available to write the entire file to. This is bound to happen after someone has been writing and deleting files and programs to their hard drive over a moderate length of time. When a file is fragmented all over the hard drive like this, it makes it more difficult for the hard drive to access the file, as it must scan all over the drive to find and read all of the different chunks.

What a defrag does is simply reorganize the hard drive, so that any extra chunks of data are all moved to one area, rather than being scattered throughout the drive, freeing up large chunks for other programs and files to be written to in sequential order. This saves your hard drive some extra work, and you, some loss in performance.

One of our Captain Optimizer’s great features is an affective and simple to use defragmentation tool called “Optimize Hard Drive”.

Judy

Softarama team

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