by Joseph Love

Created on: August 26, 2007

In my 20+ years of PC Repair experience, I've fielded my share of questions about the fragmentation and defragmentation of hard drives. In this article, I'll explain what fragmentation is and debunk some of the common myths about it.
Files, photos, programs and the operating system are stored on the hard disk of your computer. The hard disk functions most efficiently when related information is stored together in a single section on the disk.

When your computer is new, all the files are stored at the beginning of your hard disk, and the free space is nearer to the end of the drive. Additionally, each file is stored all in a single section of the hard disk (this condition is known as contiguous). As you use your computer, files are constantly growing, shrinking, being added and deleted. When a file is deleted from the middle of your hard disk, you wind up with a section of free space within the used section of the hard disk. Your hard disk no longer has all the free space grouped together, as it has a small section of free space within the previous space where all the data was. This free-space that is not grouped together with the rest of the free space is known as non-contiguous free space.

Whenever a new file gets added to your computer, it will look free space on the hard disk, and it may choose a non-contiguous section of free space to start writing. The computer starts writing data into the blank space, but can run out of space within the section. When this happens, it looks for more space anywhere on the disk, and will inevitably find free space far away from where it started writing. The result is that you have a file that is scattered across the disk. This condition is known as fragmentation.

One fragmented file is not a problem, however, as you use your PC more and more, fragmentation gets worse and worse. Additionally related files are stored far from each other on the disk, and this leads to a very slow, fragmented drive.

Never fear, you can defragment your drive by running the disk defrag utility. In windows XP, simply click on "My Computer" (found on the desktop or under the start menu). Find your hard disk "C" and right click on that list and choose properties. Under the tools tab, you'll find the defrag utility. Start it up and choose "Defragment Now".

When this utility is ran, it tries (as best as it can) to re-shuffle the data on your drive and get all the files back into one piece, and put all the free space together on the disk. The defrag utility

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