File Fragmentation - Why It Is A Problem And How To Tackle It

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If your computer is running slow as of late there are any number of reasons that could be the factor behind the situation. One likely candidate for being the culprit of your computer slowdown is file fragmentation. File fragmentation can take place on any computer, it is not an indication of bad hardware or faulty programming or any human errors. This file fragmentation comes about as a result of simple physics. It is something that should be addressed once in a while as it takes some time to build up, so once every six months or so should be good enough for defragmenting your hard drive. In this article I am going to explain what precisely file fragmentation is, why it happens, and what you can do to fix it.

What is file fragmentation? The response to that inquiry demands a bit of clarification. There is no simple answer. For those of you who recall vinyl albums, those are excellent physical representations of the logical arrangement of a hard drive. The disc of the hard drive is circular and it has a sequence of concentric rings. Each of those rings is divided into segments and each of those sectors can hold a specific amount of data. When your computer saves data on your hard disk the data cannot overlap sectors. So that when data is bigger than what can fit in one sector the information is separated into two separate pieces. If at all possible those two separate pieces would then be placed into adjacent sectors of the hard drive. In that instance the information would still not be fragmented. Sometimes however there are not enough adjacent segments on the hard drive to save a complete set of data and so one piece of the data has to be stored in a completely separate area of the hard disk. Now you have fragmented files. It's not a drastic concern but it does contribute to the amount of time required to get the file next time you want use it.

The reasons why information cannot always be saved in adjacent segments of the hard disk are fairly simple and easy to understand. The adjacent segments already have information from other programs or files. The more programs you have installed and the number of times that you install and uninstall different programs contributes to the amount of fragmentation on your hard drive. The solution is rather simple though. We just need to use a drive defragmentation tool.

The utility that I highly recommend using for defragmenting a Windows based computer is smart defrag. Do a Google search for Smart defrag, download it, and install it. This program is very simple and easy to run but it will require quite a bit of time so be ready to start the program and then walk away for an hour or so while it does its work.


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