What is defragmentation and what is it for?

Modern users are often spoiledpowerful computers and inexpensive components to them to such an extent that they do not even know the basic concepts. That is why they often find themselves in a situation when the car begins to shamelessly "brake" and with extreme reluctance to respond to any team. As a rule, they accuse "evil viruses", which penetrated the computer, but reality is sometimes much more prosaic. For example, do you know what defragmentation is and why is it extremely necessary for your system? If not, we invite you to read this article.

Be aware that all information on harddisks are not ordered arrays, but in a fairly "free" order. The file system is designed so that any object can be written in scraps (much depends on the size of the cluster), each of which is often located far apart. Given the frequency of rotation of the spindle of modern hard drives, we can say that in most cases, there is nothing wrong with this. But how will this information help us to know what defragmentation is? Do not rush, as soon we will get to this point.

Problems begin whenscraps of a large file becomes too much, and they all are far apart from each other. In this case, the load on the reading heads of the disk is so powerful that the access time to some document is seriously slowed down.

And now we learn what defragmentation is: the so-called process, when all individual fragments of the file are again located nearby. So on a hard disk not only the amount of free space is freed, but also its "mileage" is considerably increased due to the less load on the reader.

Of course, that for this there are manyapplications: some of them are paid, but many are distributed under the GNU license, so you do not have to shell out for them. However, the program for defragmentation in Russian is built into all currently used versions of Windows OS. To start it, you need to click on the "Start" button, select the "All Programs" submenu, find the "Standard" folder, find the "Service" subdirectory and select the "Defragmentation" program in it.

Found? Now run it. Before you will be a fairly concise dialog box, which displays all the drives available in the system. Select the desired one by clicking on it with the left mouse button. After that, click the "Analyze disk" button - and the program for defragmenting will find out how much "scattered" the files are.

If after the analysis the percentage of fragmentation will behigher than 14%, it is better to immediately press the "Disk Defragmentation" button. If this figure is above 40%, then it should be urgently carried out, since the hard drive is subjected to very serious loads.

Note that with a strong "neglect" of the mediathe process can take a very long time. During this period, the computer is better not to touch at all. Ideally, you can leave it "clean up" for the whole night. Of course, it is advisable to worry about UPS, as the voltage surges at this time are completely useless.

So you found out what defragmentation is!