Defragmenting the Windows hard drive
Defragmenting the hard drive. Before we go into defragmenting the hard drive it will be useful to explain what fragmentation is and how it occurs. On a hard disk information is stored in segments called sectors, each sector is 512 bytes in length. The Windows operating system stores files in units of multiple sectors called clusters or allocation units. Typically a cluster will be 4 kilo bytes. Files are placed on a Windows disk in the first available space and are allocated complete clusters. So if we have a file that is 1kb long it will occupy one cluster, a 5kb file would occupy two clusters a 21kb file will occupy six clusters. In a perfect world files would occupy consecutive clusters making ready and writing the files faster. As we use a computer we are continually adding and removing files. Consider what would happen in a simple system or three 3Kb files on a disk that had four clusters numbered one to four. Each file would occupy one cluster, file on occupying cluster one and file two occupying cluster two and so on. If we deleted the second file, cluster two would become empty, if we later added a fourth file that was 7Kb long. The fourth file would need to occupy two clusters. When we write the file the operating system will see cluster two as empty and write part of the file there. As the fourth file needs two clusters the second bit of file four would go into cluster four. The two parts of file four and not next to each other. We call this fragmentation. So now we know what fragmentation is and that it slows down the system, how do we get rid of it?Defragmenting a drive
There are many freely available tools to defragment a drive, indeed Windows comes with the graphical Disk Defragmenter dfrgui.exe and the command line Defrag.exe. Both are good, free and already on your Windows PC!Defraggler options |
So how often should you run a defrag, well that depends and really may be just a mater of opinion. I would suggest that once a drive is reasonably defragmented then keeping it that way can be achieved by defragging once every month or two.
Follow @RolfeJJames
No comments:
Post a Comment