Maintaining Your Hard Drive: Defrag

Everyone tosses around the term “Hard Drive,” but do you really know much about this piece of equipment that operates your PC? More importantly, do you know how to keep it healthy?

A hard drive, aka hard disk drive, is the device that writes data, that is, stores data on rotating plates with magnetic surfaces. When you issue a command to your computer, the data is retrieved and viewable.

Operating System Fragments Files

Fragmentation occurs when your operating system breaks a file into pieces because there is not enough space on the storage device where the file was originally saved.

Your computer system keeps a record of where the different pieces of the file are stored. This is done by using a FAT or File Allocation Table. A similar file system is NTFS.

When you retrieve the file again, the operating system queries the file system (FAT/NTFS/etc.other) to locate all the different pieces of the file.

Defragmentation, or defrag for short, is the process of scanning the file system and rejoining the split files. It’s rather like gathering all the pieces together and lining them up next to each other.

Why Defrag?

Many computer users think you don’t need to defrag computer hard drives now—that it’s something you did in the days of DOS and earlier versions of Windows. Not true.

Defragmenting your computer system, or defragging as everyone says, is a habit everyone should acquire because it will keep your computer running at peak performance. Defragging regularly will keep your PC from picking up those bad habits like running slow and snail’s pace performance.

What defragmenting does is to analyze your hard drive and reorganize the files it finds so they can be accessed faster. It’s easy to do, and the software tool used to do this is part of the Windows package. Just open Disk Defrag and select your options and click run. Better yet, schedule it using your system tool.

Takeaway Truth

A well-maintained computer will perform better and generally last longer.