|
We get these
types of questions all the time about DEFRAG. It's amazing
how long DEFRAG has been around and yet most people still
don't understand it. So I'll do my best to explain it in
simple English.
DEFRAG is
short for "defragment" or "defragmentation." If you have a
fragment of something, you only have part of it. This
happens with files on the computer. What happens is, when
files are written to the hard drive, they are typically
written in the first available space. Initially your hard
disk has plenty of space so it can write the files to the
drive in one contiguous piece.
But over time
as you add files and programs and then delete other files or
programs, the spaces that were once filled with individual
contiguous files (both large and small in size) are now
empty. So when your computer goes to write a larger file, it
ends up writing one into those several smaller empty
spaces. So since the file isn't in one long contiguous
space, it's now "fragmented" because it's one big file
scattered into several small pieces all over the drive. So
when your computer goes to recall that file, rather than
picking it up in one big piece very quickly and efficiently,
it has to go searching all over your hard drive and picking
it up in several different tiny pieces--very inefficiently.
And in doing so, it takes longer to pull up the file or open
the program.
So what
DEFRAG does, is it takes those files that are currently
broken into several smaller pieces and lines them back up in
one single contiguous piece. I always compare it to an old
vinyl record--where one song ends, the next one begins.
That's what it does to your hard drive. It puts each of the
files in one long piece, end-to-end. All the files on your
hard drive take up the same amount of space, whether or not
they're in tiny pieces or they're in one big piece. So as
you can see, since all it is doing is simple "housekeeping"
it's not possible for DEFRAG to create more hard disk
space...it just cleans up the space you already have
and puts it into better order.
Back to the rest of the useful
information |
