Explanations

Defrag Your Hard Drive Regularly

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Defragmenting (a.k.a. ‘defragging’) your hard drive is one of the best things you can do to speed up your computing experience. Here’s a simplistic analogy that will help you understand why it’s so important.

Your hard drive is like a roll of toilet paper. As your computer writes files to it, it calculates the number of sheets required to hold the file and then goes hunting. Let’s say your file requires 3 sheets. Your computer goes and finds the first three contiguous sheets available that will fit that file and writes it on those sheets. Yay! File saved!

The next day you realize you have something to add to that file, so you open it up (the computer goes and finds those 3 sheets and brings their contents into RAM.) You add whatever you need to the file and click ’save’. Your computer takes that file and goes back to those 3 sheets and - uh-oh - it won’t fit anymore. So, your computer will write what will fit on the original 3 sheets, and then has to go hunting for another sheet to hold the rest of the file. It finds the next available empty sheet 20 sheets on down the roll, and writes the rest of your file there. At the end of the original 3 sheets, it leaves a note reminding itself of where it wrote the rest of the file. Next time you open that file, it’s going to take a little longer for the computer to get it for you because now it has to go to two places, instead of just one. (On your hard drive, those sheets are called sectors.)

This is what happens with every file you create and modify, so you can imagine how fragmented your files can get over time. This is the reason you want to defrag on a regular basis. Defragging gathers up all those pieces of your files all over your hard drive and (with very few exceptions) writes the complete file in one spot. When it’s done, your files are in contiguous sectors and all the little ‘notes’ about where to find the rest of the file are no longer necessary. Now, when you open up a file, it opens up more quickly because the computer doesn’t have to hunt all over the hard drive for all its pieces.

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