What is a contiguous file?
The physical space on a hard drive is organized into thousands of sectors. When you open up My Computer, it looks like everything is organized neatly. A contiguous file occupies sectors that are all together. A fragmented file is one that is broken into pieces, each piece going into a separate series of sectors. While Windows shows it as a nice single file, it’s really in pieces scattered around the hard drive. This happens when there are not enough free sectors in one place for the file to fit on the drive in one piece. Accessing a fragmented file will take longer than accessing a contiguous file. Defragging a hard drive is the process of locating these fragmented files (which could be any file on your computer), gathering up the pieces, and shuffling things around so that each file can be in one piece. A contiguous file (which could be any file on your computer) is one that is on your hard drive in one piece, and so can be accessed faster than fragmented files.
