What is Hard Disk Defragmentation? How do I keep it in control?
A brief recap will help us understand Hard Disk Defragmentation a little better: • A Hard Disk consists of multiple platters, with each platter being coated with magnetic media on both sides • The Platters are divided into concentric circles called ‘Tracks’. Each Track is divided into little arcs, each capable of holding 512 Bytes and called Sectors. The Sector is a Hard Disk’s smallest addressable area • The same Track from each of the Hard Disk’s platters (say Track X) is called a ‘Cylinder’ • A collection of Sectors (2 or 4 or 8 Sectors) is together called a Cluster. Files are written to Clusters, with no cluster holding more than one file – any left-over space is unused and is called File Slack. For example, if the Hard Disk has 8 Sectors per Cluster, each Cluster would hold 8 x 512 = 4096 Bytes. Thus, a file of 4097 Bytes would be split into 2 Clusters, with the first Cluster holding the first 4096 Bytes of the file and the second Cluster holding the last Byte: the rest of the sec
