Defragmenting your Hard Drives --- Speed up your PC by regrouping files on your hard drive

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Defragmenting your Hard Drives
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Defragmentation is something that is required from time to time on your
hard disk drive (HDD).

When a drive is empty it is easy to find space to store files anywhere
on the disk. As files are erased they leave empty spaces between the
files next to them. As you write and erase files over time, many of
these empty spaces are created. If a file being written is bigger than
the largest free space, then it must broken up into smaller pieces and
stored in a number of these empty spaces.

== Fragmentation ==

This process of files being broken up and stored in a number of smaller
pieces is called fragmentation. A section of the disk contains what is
called the File Allocation Table (FAT). It is a file system that keeps
track of where all the files are stored on the hard drive.

Eventually a condition exists where there are many fragmented files and
empty spaces scattered all over the disk. When this happens the HDD is
said to be very fragmented. The FAT has to work very hard to manage
these chopped up files.

Instead of writing and reading files that are contiguous (in one
piece), the read/write head in the HDD must move up and down and jump
all over the disk from fragment to fragment to access the file. This
takes a lot of time!

It's like Restaurant Seating

The FAT does the same thing as the person who seats you at a
restaurant.

When the restaurant is empty it's easy. There are plenty of tables that
will fit your group. They find you a table big enough, or maybe even
slightly bigger than you need and you all sit down.

As the restaurant fills up it gets more difficult to find the right
sized table quickly. A couple of things can happen when you show up to
be seated.

The greeter checks for space and finds a table that has just freed up
and will fit all the people in your party. They seat you as soon as the
table is emptied and made ready for your group.

Or they may say, 'We don't have a table big enough to seat all of you,
the wait is 25 minutes. Hang out in the in the lounge and we'll call
you when we have space.'

Let's seat your Group in Fragments

Files don't care whether they are fragmented, or located together in a
contiguous space of the disk. We know people do care, but let's imagine
the people in this restaurant don't care either.

So instead of making you wait for a big enough table the greeter says
'we don't have space enough for your party of five at one table, but
two of you can fit at this table, one at that table and two more can
fit at the table in the back.' So you go and get split up at different
tables. Your party has been fragmented.

The greeter continues seating new people this way until waiters are
getting confused with which food goes with which party, who gets the
bill and so on. The whole process bogs down and eventually grinds to a
halt.

The same thing happens on your HDD. The PC spends more and more time
working with the FAT to find all the pieces of the file you're
attempting to access.

== Defragmentation ==

Finally the restaurant manager says, 'Wait a minute,' just as you might
say when it seems to take longer and longer to read and write files on
your PC.

He says 'We are going to defragment this place.' He has everyone get
up, move to one side together with their original group. He then
figures out how many 1, 2, 3 etc. person groups he has and how they
will best fit into his tables. He reseats each group at an optimum
sized table. He now even has some spare tables open for new guests.
Everything flows along smoothly again.

Running a defragmentation program on your PC reorganizes the files on
the HDD so that each file is located in one contiguous space. All the
free space is grouped together on the disk as well.

How do I Defragment my Drive?

Go to the desktop and double-click 'My Computer'.

Right click the drive you want to defragment, (C:) in most cases.

In the drop down menu that appears, click 'Properties'.

Click the 'Tools' Tab in the dialog box that appears.

In the Tools section, select 'Defragment Now' and defragmentation
begins.

NOTE: Don't defragment a drive you want to use anytime soon. It can
easily take a couple of hours on a large, fragmented drive. The end of
the day is a great time to kick this maintenance routine off.
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