You may wonder if your Solid State Drive (SSD) suffers from similar predicaments. Related Article: Windows User Account Control (UAC) Explained

After running Disk Defragmentation, most of the available free space is arranged in one large continuous piece thus new files written will not be fragmented.

During Defragmentation, any files that have been split up and spread all over will be reassembled to one location which will see a performance gain in access times.

Related Article: 10 easy ways to Speed Up your slow computerĭisk Defragmentation will undo the effects of a fragmented disk in two ways This is because the platters have to physically spin faster to access the scattered files.

The main side effect of file fragmentation is a significant slow down of the read times of a mechanical hard drive. This subdivision of a file within a hard drive is what is referred to as file fragmentation. Then whatever remains will be pushed to the back pages where there’s unwritten space. What will happen is that the computer will first place part of the huge file in the free available gaps until they are all filled up. Now let’s assume at this point you bring in a relatively huge file to this hard drive. You end up with gaps of unwritten spaces scattered all over the drive. Now imagine repeating those delete operations over and over. Now, if you delete a file that was stored close to page 1 you will have some free empty space in the middle of other existing data. However, as time moves, you may need to delete a file or move it from one folder to another. When you first copy files to it, they are all arranged to start from the first page towards the last.

Consider an empty hard disk to be a new blank exercise book. Read More: 10 quick ways to make your Windows PC run fasterĭisk fragmentation is a consequence of how a mechanical hard disk writes and arranges data.

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