by Clive Mcpherson

Created on: April 06, 2009

Fragmentation is the most common way that a hard drive can become deficient in performance; however it is a very easy issue to resolve.

System generally running slow

The usual symptom of a fragmented hard drive is that your system starts to run slowly as follows:

Symptom: The overall performance of your computer has reduced; when accessing data or executing programs, they take a longer than normal to open. Even after they eventually open, their performance is still rather sluggish. Although this behavior can be attributed to other causes, such as viruses and memory issues, the most common cause of reduction in system performance is a fragmented hard drive.

Explanation: Over time data on your hard drive will become fragmented, which occurs because the storage space is being used inefficiently. I've included the following example to give you a better understanding of fragmentation.

Example:

You create a document and save it as file (A)

You then create a second document and save as file (B)

Both these files will be saved contiguously (one right after the other)

Now you decide to add more information into file (A), but when you save the file, it is now larger than before so it won't fit into the space it previously occupied.

The system saves as much of file (A) in its previously occupied space, then saves the remainder at the next available space on the drive; in this case immediately after the end of file (B)

File (A) is now fragmented into two pieces.

When retrieving the document, your hard drive now has to locate the different fragments of file (A), then your operating systems has to reassemble them appropriately. The time to retrieve the document has now increased.

The above example is a very simple explanation of fragmentation for the sake of clarity; a file can easily be fragmented into hundreds of pieces, and when you start to multiply that by the thousands of files on your system, and the numerous deleted files which leave empty spaces randomly created across your hard drive, you now begin to understand why fragmentation can have such a negative impact on the performance of your system.

The time to load a document into a word processor (let's say 5 seconds), could easily increase to 15 seconds or more depending on how badly fragmented it is.

So, now that you have an understanding of what fragmentation is, what can you do about it?

Resolution: The simplest way to address this issue is to defragment a hard drive using a disk utility such as the built-in defragmentation tools in Microsoft Windows (applies to all the latest versions of MS Windows).

The defragmentation process, as you may have deduced by now, simply reverses fragmentation by locating all the individual fragments of each file and reconstructing them so that all the files are stored on your system in a whole and contiguous manner.

The following step-by-step guides will help you to quickly resolve disk fragmentation issues:

Step-By-Step Guide:

How To Analyze and Defragment a Disk in Windows XP

Improve performance by defragmenting your hard disk (Vista)

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