Hi guys/girls everyone

Can anyone tell me out there what the deal is with defragmentation of hardiscs/harddrive... some boffins say it is good to compact the files regularly, others say no don't!

What is the deal here does it do any good to the function of the operation of the PC...

Cheers nick

Defragging puts all the data from the program physically next to one another for more quick access by the hard drive. Along the way usuallu a scandisk is performed and the operating system can mark off any bad areas so that the system does not write to those areas. Defragmentation services do not compact anything.

When you save and delete files and programs, etc. on a hard drive, Windows use the next available empty space on the drive itself. If that space is not big enough, it looks for the next available space, etc.

A "table of contents" tracks where all these fragments are.

Overtime, a disk can become very fragmented, and it takes more and more time for Windows to find each piece of a file and recombine it, such as when opening or editing a file.

So, use Windows Defrag utility once in a while to search for fragmented files which then places them contiguously at the "front" of the hard drive.

Part of the Defraggring will also move blocks of data scattered on the hard drive to the "front" in essence "compacting" the data, and combining the empty spaces. Although the Windows defrag doesn't compact 100%. You need a third party program to really compact.

It depends how often you're putting new stuff into your hard-drive, but I defragment about once a month.

The bits of information are organized into tiny litte "clusters" instead of complete blocks. That way it is easy to fit lots of information into a small space, a bit like cornflakes in a ceral box - if it was all in big blocks, you'd be left with loads of little gaps that you couldn't fit any blocks into.

But after a while, you've got information all over the place like lego blocks all mixed up in a box. Defragmenting is like taking all those lego blocks and organizing them into colours and sizes so that they more quick to find.

Hye!
You already have got answers from experts and they are telling right. When you will analyze your disk in disk defragmenter you can see white space between colors. Defragmentation will put all colors that are data in one space.this will make your system faster. I recommend that you do it in every 15days.