How Does Defragmenting Help a Computer?
The hard drive in a computer stores data in sectors. These are also known as blocks, depending on the manufacturer. Each sector is numbered, starting from zero, and continuing up to however many sectors are on the drive. When a file is saved onto the drive, the disk operating system and the hard drive controller work together to break up that file into sector-sized chunks. The system will save the file and track which sectors have been used by which files. The sectors are used sequentially. What happens when a file is deleted? The operating system checks which sectors were filled by the file and marks them as available for use. There’s only one problem with this. The system will continue to use the sequential numbers. It won’t go back and fill the newly freed sectors until it gets to the end of the list. Fragmentation happens when the system reaches the last of the sequential sectors and then starts over with the sectors that used to hold data. Fragmentation causes the hard drive to wo
