Fragmentation? What is it? Why do I care? How do I use
hard drive defragmentation?
File fragmentation of your hard drive's file structure will cause poor
performance when you start you computer, cause it to react slowly when you try
to open a file or application.
It occurs on a daily basis. It will occur anytime you write a file. The
amount of fragmentation will depend on how much free space you have on your hard
drive. A hard drive that has very little open space will have a higher amount of
file fragmentation than say a almost new drive.
When you save a file to your hard drive it is written to what is called
contiguous blocks, that is block a, block b, block c, and so on. But if your
hard drive is low on space then the file system can not always write your file
to contagious blocks. This causes the slow down in your performance because the
file system has to find empty block to write your file and when you want to open
the file it has to go find all the blocks that the file was written to.
So to
get the most out of your hard drive you need to defragment your hard drive
either on a schedule or when you notice a degrading of performance.
You can use the built in Disk Defragmenter or you can purchase a third party
product. For a pc the built in defragmenter program will work just fine.
Depending on the size of the drive and how fragmented it is will determine how
long it will take to combine all of your files.
Before you start the
defragmentation you should go to the temp folders and delete all the files
there, they are useless unless you have a program open and there is a file in
the temp folder for the application to use until you save it.
If you are getting the "Disk Cleanup" warning you need to delete the temp
files before you defrag your hard drive. (search for "temp" folders, delete all contents.)
You may want to run
the program in the 'Safe Mode', restart your
system, press F8 when the Windows startup screen is displayed, select 'Safe
Mode' from the menu. You should run your anti-virus and anti-spyware programs
before doing the defragment. Empty the temp files!
To start the Disk Defragmenter go to Start/Programs/Accessories/System
tools..
(Note: To
get the best defrag of your hard drive close all programs, email, word doc
processor, all of them. You may want to run the program after your business day
and let it run over night, some times on a really fragmented drive it will take
a couple of hours or more to complete the task)
Once it is started select the volume in the top window, then right click and
run the analyze volume. Once the analysis is complete then let the program
defrag the volume. You should see a performance boost when you have completed
the defrag.
(
Note the blocks
of
red, these are fragmented files, the
green
block represents unmovable system files, the
blue
blocks represent files that are not fragmented).
You should defrag all your drives periodically this will
preclude performance problems from the file system.
About the time it takes to defragment a drive:
When you run defrag on a system the time for competition depends on:
a) How big the drive is, the bigger the
drive the longer it will take
b) How fragmented the drive is, if the drive
is highly fragmented it will take a long time.
c) How many open programs you have, open
programs will delay the completion of the process. (see note above!)
If you have a drive larger than 20 gig and has
not been defragged before or it has been a long time since defragging it the
process will take a long time, I have seen it run over 24 hours.
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