| | | | The process of reorganizing the order in which files are stored on a computer's hard disk to reduce or eliminate the amount of "fragementation" of files, that is to say the degree to which stored files are split into fragments located on different parts of the disk. Fragmentation occurs "naturally" as part of the process of creating, using, modifying and moving or deleting fils. It results in a reduction in performance as the read/write heads of the hard disk have to move to and from different areas of the disk to read a file. In the case of large files, fragmentation may result in the file being split into thousands of parts. Fragmentation not only reduces the performance of a computer but also can result in premature wear and failure of a hard disk drive. The ideal situation is to have a file stored in one place in a contiguous order - this makes files access much quicker and reduces mechanical stress on the drive. From time to time, good disk housekeeping requires that a disk be defragmented to move all of the parts of files back together. Some users do this on a regular basis, others rarely - although the advent of very large capacity hard disk drives with large caches has reduced the impact of fragmentation upon performance, it still makes sense to defragment drives frequently to prolong the life of the drive. In addition, if a disk does eventually fail, data recovery is much easier when the files are arranged contiguously rather than if scattered across the whole disk surface. Disk defragmenting utilities are built into many operating systems such as later versions of DOS, Windows 98, XP and Vista (although not NT, as it was thought NTFS did not require, it having been designed to minimize fragmentation - even so, NTFS does not combine chunks of free space). Many third party defragmenting utilities are also available. | | | |
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