Disk defragmenter

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Guest

Hi

Can anyone tell me what disk defragmenter is and how it can help my system?

Thanks
Carl
 
Carl said:
Can anyone tell me what disk defragmenter is and how it can help my
system?
Click to expand...


Files are written to your drive in units called clusters. Clusters can vary
in size, depending on a couple of factors, but
if your drive is NTFS, you probably use 4K clusters. That means that any
file larger than 4K uses multiple clusters.

If, for a particular file, those clusters are adjacent to each other on the
drive, reading and writing them is as fast as
possible. But if they are spread out over the drive, the read/write heads
have to move to get to all the clusters, and
access to the file is slowed down. That spreading out of the clusters (their
not being contiguous) is called "fragmentation" because the file now
consists of several non-contiguous fragments.


For various reasons, as time goes on, files that are rewritten tend to
become fragmented (non-contiguous) and access to the drive slows down. The
more you write to a drive, the more fragmented it becomes. Defragmention is
the process of finding fragmented files, and rearranging the clusters they
use so they are once again contiguous. The result (at least in theory) is
faster access to the drive.
 
Carl said:
Hi

Can anyone tell me what disk defragmenter is and how it can help my
system?
Click to expand...

Think putting matching socks together when you take them from the dryer
rather than having to root through the sock drawer for the mate. Times
several million.
 
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