What does fragmented files mean

As an analogy, imagine that you want to play a card game that requires an entire deck of cards. Before you can play the game, you have to retrieve the deck from wherever it might be. If the cards are spread all over a room, the time needed to gather them together and put them in order would be much greater than if they were sitting on the table, nicely organized.

A deck of cards spread all over a room can be thought of as a fragmented deck of cards, much like the fragmented data on a hard drive that, when gathered together defragmented , might equal a file you want to open or a process from a particular software program that needs to run.

Fragments happen when the file system allows gaps to develop between the different pieces of a file. If you know anything about file systems in general, you may have already guessed that the file system was the culprit in this fragmentation business, but why?

Sometimes fragmentation happens because the file system reserved too much space for the file when it was first created, and therefore left open areas around it. Previously deleted files are also another reason the file system fragments data when written. When a file is removed, its previously occupied space is now open for new files to be saved to it.

As you can imagine, if that now open space isn't large enough to support the whole size of the new file, then only a part of it can be saved there. The rest must be positioned somewhere else, hopefully, nearby but not always. Having some pieces of a file in one place while the others are located elsewhere is going to require the hard drive to look through the gaps or spaces occupied by other files until it can gather all the necessary pieces to bring the file together for you.

This method of storing data is completely normal and likely won't ever change. The alternative would be for the file system to constantly reshuffle all existing data on the drive each and every time a file is changed, which would bring the data writing process to a crawl, slowing down everything else with it.

So, while it's frustrating that fragmentation exists, which slows the computer down a little bit, you might think about it as a "necessary evil" in a sense—this small problem instead of a much larger one.

As you know from all the discussion thus far, files on a storage device can be accessed much faster, at least on a traditional hard drive, when the pieces that make them up are close together. Over time, as more and more fragmentation occurs, there can be a measurable, even noticeable, slowdown.

You might experience it as general computer sluggishness but, assuming excessive fragmentation has occurred, much of that slowness may be due to the time it takes your hard drive to access file after file, each in any number of different physical places on the drive. So, on occasion, defragmentation , or the act of reversing fragmentation i. This is usually just referred to as defragging. The defragging process isn't something you do manually. Like we already mentioned, your experience with your files is consistent, so there's no rearranging needed on your end.

Fragmentation isn't just a disorganized collection of files and folders. A dedicated defragging tool is what you need. Disk Defragmenter is one such defragger and is included for free in the Windows operating system. That said, there are many third-party options as well, the better of which do a considerably better job at the defragmentation process than Microsoft's built-in tool.

File fragmentation is a term that describes a group of files that are scattered throughout a hard drive platter instead of one continuous location. Fragmentation is caused when information is deleted from a hard drive and small gaps are left behind to be filled by new data. As new data is saved to the computer, it is placed in these gaps. Storage algorithms break the data apart so that it will fit into the available space.

The process of defragmentation moves the data blocks on the hard drive around to bring all the parts of a file together. Defragmentation reduces file system fragmentation, increasing the efficiency of data retrieval and thereby improving the overall performance of the computer.

At the same time, it cleans the storage and provides additional storage capacity. Defragmentation is the opposite of fragmentation, which is an inefficient use of computer storage. Fragmentation occurs gradually as users change, save, or delete files.

The saved modifications for a file are usually stored at a hard drive location that is different from that of the original file. Supplementary modifications are stored to even more locations. Gradually, both the file and the hard drive become fragmented, and the computer becomes very slow as it needs to search in various places to open a file.

Windows-based computers require periodic defragmentation; Unix and Linux-based computers do not because of a different design for storing data, even if the same hardware is used. Microsoft Windows provides a proprietary defragmenting tool within its OS. Third-party versions also are available. Easy to follow. No jargon. Pictures helped. Didn't match my screen. Incorrect instructions. Too technical. Not enough information.

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