Defragging A Computer Technology

[Soffie]

What does defragging a computer do?

Apart from lining all the little segments neatly.

My laptop was working just fine but did the defrag thing this morning just because I could. Nothing seems to have altered for the better - or worse?

 

[Mouth]

Reorders the data on the hard drive for faster access.

Physical HDs have to move from one point to another which takes time, a defrag puts the pertinent data into chunks next to each other for faster access.

In layman's terms.

 

[Bandit]

It's like sitting in your chair and realising the tv remote and the paper are already there, rather than sitting down then having to get back up again to fetch the remote from the other chair and the paper from the dining room table.

 

[Franco Pinion]

As an aside, for anyone with SSD's, they do not need defragging, and this can actually accelerate wear and tear.

 

[Fraser]

If you're relatively lucky it might speed up your PC a little bit. Boot up times can be improved. The correct solution, though, is to get an SSD.

 

[Dylan]

Over time, files and things will eventually end up in a wrong place. Defragging the drive puts them back to where they should be so it's a bit quicker to retrieve them.

It's like when you'd be asked to sort out an offices filing system and files have ended up all over the place and in wrong order etc

 

[8-Ball]

Think of a file - an actual cardboard file filled with 100 sheets of paper in it that make up "a report".

On a hard drive, the "file.doc" is the cardboard file, and the pieces of paper are written to the disk, 1 sheet per disk sector (the smallest box that data can be stored in on an HDD).

Ideally, that file will be written to sectors in a single row. But there may simply not be any areas left that are big enough to do this, so this file.doc is written to various locations around the disk - in fragments. The file is fragmented

When it comes to loading that file, the disk has to go to various places to retrieve the data and load it for you.

Defragmenting is a big game of solitaire that moves fragments around so that files can be put back into order. Also, it tries to write all the data to the fastest part of the disk - the inside.

And yes, SSDs do not benefit from this and it will cause wear and tear on it. Windows automatically turns this off so its not something you need to worry about.

 

[Soffie]

Think of a file - an actual cardboard file filled with 100 sheets of paper in it that make up "a report".

This makes things clearer. Thank you.