Defragmentation is like cleaning house for your PC, it picks up all of the pieces of

data that are spread across your hard drive and puts them back together again.
Why is defragmentation important? Because every computer suffers from the
constant growth of fragmentation and if you don’t clean house, your PC suffers.
Disk fragmentation occurs when a file is broken up into pieces to fit on the disk.
Because files are constantly being written, deleted and resized, fragmentation is
a natural occurrence. When a file is spread out over several locations, it takes
longer to read and write. But the effects of fragmentation are far more
widespread: Slow PC performance, long boot-times, random crashes and freeze-
ups – even a complete inability to boot up at all. Many users blame these
problems on the operating system or simply think their computer is “old”, when
hard disk fragmentation is most often the real culprit.

Defragmentation is the process of consolidating fragmented files on the user's

hard drive. Files become fragmented when data is written to disk, and there is
not enough contiguous space to hold the complete file. Storage algorithms break
the data apart so that it will fit into the available space.

The process of defragmentation moves the data blocks on the hard drive around
to bring all the parts of a file together. Defragmentation reduces file system
fragmentation, increasing the efficiency of data retrieval and thereby improving
the overall performance of the computer. At the same time, it cleans the storage
and provides additional storage capacity. FragmentationTo you and me, a file on
your disk is a single thing. You open it, you work on it, you save it. It’s a single
entity. We might compare it to say a book.To your computer, however, a file is a
lot more like a bunch of pages in that book that it has to keep track
of individually.

Imagine that you have a book, but that the pages are randomly
scattered throughout your house. You have a list of where each page is, so when
you want to read your book you go find page 1, then you look on the list for
page 2 and go to that, then look up page 3, and so on. In order to read your
book in order, you’re racing around the house like crazy because the pages are
all over.

That’s a fragmented file. The sectors1 that make up the file are scattered all over
the disk. The result is that when you access the file, Windows has to race all
over the
disk to retrieve the whole thing. That takes time.
Defragmentation
Defragmentation is nothing more than pulling all the pages/sectors together in
order, so that they’re close to each other. In an ideally defragmented disk, the
sectors of each file would be in an orderly sequence one right after the other,
just like the pages in a book.

Now, UNlike the pages of a book strewn about your home, disk sectors are
a little more limited in how they can be laid out. The result is that in order for the
sectors of one file to be able to be arranged in a defragmented order, other files
or fragments of files may have to be first moved out of the way to make room.

In fact, that’s what a defragmenting tool spends most of its time doing: moving
files around on the disk to make room so that other files can be laid out in order.

It’s also one of the things that differentiates one disk defragmenting tool from
another: some are simply better or more efficient at moving things around as
little as possible so as to be done as quickly as possible with an result that’s as
acceptable as possible.

Why fragmentation happens

Fragmentation happens because files on the disk are constantly changing; being
created, deleted, grown, or shrunk in size. And all of that happens in a fairly
random order.