Over time, with a lot of erasing and writing to the hard drive (and not necessarily us always, but our operating system) our hard drive gradually becomes fragmented.
What do we mean by "fragmented"?
Quite simply, the data of a program, for example, instead of being all in one place on our hard drive, is found in small pieces here and there.
How did this happen?
Quite simply, by deleting some files, we created small gaps in our hard drive, in places where there is a lot of other data around them (and not free space).
So, when we put a new file in, these small gaps (which may be scattered here and there) are covered by "pieces" of our new file, thus making our file broken into many pieces here and there.
It's not exactly like that, we're just describing it in such a simple way so that you understand the concept of fragmentation.
So we have fragmentation and the hard drive needs defragmentation!
What is hard drive defragmentation?
What is hard drive defragmentation? Hard drive defragmentation is essentially a “compaction” process.
In other words, very simply, defragmentation is the process by which such small "broken" data is gathered into a single space so that, for example, all the pieces of a fragmented file are not in different parts of the hard drive, but are gathered into one.
So after the reconstruction, all of this fragmented data in our files is located separately, concentrated in a single space and not "a little here and a little there".
Why should I do a rebuild?
Reconstruction
A very logical question. We should defragment so that we don't "tired" our hard drive to look at different parts of the disk each time, for example, to read a file.
With defragmentation, it won't do that. It will simply look back to a point where the data, for example of the file we're opening, is concentrated.
This helps in the longevity of our hard drive, in better system operation and of course, in speed!
The less fragmented the disk is, the faster it is, since we save the intermediate times of "back and forth" to retrieve data, for example, a file or program that we open!
Now, on new SSD hard drives, defragmentation is not necessary and in fact, it should not be done on such drives.
All this, due to different technology compared to older engineers.
So, hard disk defragmentation is essential for our system to be faster and for the better "health" of our computer.
Source: tro-ma-ktiko.blogspot.gr
