The term "disk defragment" to a non-technical computer user may seem a little intimidating. The reality is that defragmenting your hard drive is not difficult, nor is it painful, it is however, essential.

So, what is disk defragmentation?

Disk in this case means hard drive, disk drive or hdd which is short for hard drive. Now unfortunately windows is not the best organizer of space. Everything on the hdd is placed in blocks, space allocated by Windows. The hard drive is obviously built using many parts which is a little out of the scope of this article.

What can be said is that within the metal case of the hdd there is a disc and a head. The information is stored in the disc similar to a cd for example and the head is made of two parts. A read and a write. Obviously the read part of the head does only one thing. Read. Whilst the write part, well, only does on thing again and this is, to write.

So how does this affect performance and why is all this important?

Well, as we all know, we for example travel faster in a straight line instead of a zig zag. What this means is that now we understand all information is stored using the block theory, when we install a program, the total space of the program will use however many blocks. Now lets presume that we continue to install programs, like we do on new computers, all these blocks are being taken up by the programs that we need or want.

Here is the most important part. Lets say that we no longer require a program that we installed. We, naturally uninstall the program. But what about the blocks it was using? Exactly, this is where disk defragmentation comes into play.

Imagine a series of blocks all taken up by installed programs, these blocks can be the color red. The empty or free space blocks are white. We now have for example, red block, red block, red block. white block, white block, red block and so on.

Now going back to our straight line. Imagine you are wanting to load a program, the hard drive´s head will search for all these blocks of information, obviously with so much information, and all over the place, this is going to take the hdd longer, hence taking longer to load, making you wait longer and now imagine this for every action you perform on the pc. Yes, it can take a while.

You now should have a better understanding of how a hard drive works, even if its a basic idea, but you should now also understand why we need to defragment our pc´s. And if ever in doubt, think of many blocks and straight lines!

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What is disk defragmentation?