The speed of the Windows operating system gradually decreases under the influence of various factors, one of which is the fragmentation of files on the hard disk. Disk defragmentation helps in solving this problem.
What is defragmentation for?
Defragmentation is the process of optimizing and updating the logical structure of disk partitions to organize files in a continuous sequence of clusters. Defragmentation allows you to speed up the reading and writing of files, which leads to an increase in the speed of operation of various programs and the entire operating system. This is due to the fact that read and write operations are performed at a faster rate than random accesses. In a more simplified form, defragmentation is the operation of reallocating files on a disk so that they are located in contiguous regions.
Large files span multiple clusters. When writing to an empty disk, clusters belonging to the same file are written in a row. An overflowing disk does not have sufficient areas to accommodate a file. However, the file is still written if the disc has several small areas of a total size sufficient for recording. In this case, the file is recorded as several fragments.
Splitting a file into fragments during the recording process is called fragmentation. If there are a large number of fragmented files on the disk, the read speed of the media decreases because it takes time to find the clusters containing the files. Compared to other media, for example, flash memory, the search time on them does not depend on how the sectors are located, so there is practically no fragmentation on them.
Some software requires files to be stored in sequential sectors (for example, such a requirement is imposed on image files by the built-in emulator in the Zalman VE-200 drive). In this case, even installing a solid-state drive will not save you from the need for defragmentation.
How is defragmentation done
Defragmentation is necessary on file systems such as MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows because the programs they support do not protect system components from fragmentation. It can even start on an almost empty disk with little load.
Defragmentation is performed using special defragmenter programs, which are among the preinstalled applications in the system and are able to literally collect files from their fragments. Their only drawback is the low speed of the operation: sometimes it takes several hours to wait for the defragmentation to complete.
