This page will inform you about why your hard disks become fragmented and what you can do about it.
Fragmentation causes: rapid declines in stability
system crashes
slow file access
blue screens of death!
One of the most important maintenance tasks that you can perform to keep your system optimized, is to defragment your hard disks and scan their surfaces for defects.
Depending on the type of computer user you are, you will need to perform this simple procedure daily to monthly. It all depends on your disk useage and how many files you download or write to your disk, whether the hard drive is partitioned and where you store certain folders which change frequently like your Temporary Internet Files Folder or temporary files from video or photo editing.
TIP - BY DEFAULT WINDOWS SETS THE TEMPORARY INTERNET CACHE TOO HIGH CAUSING A LOT OF WASTED SPACE. DECREASE YOUR CACHE TO 75 MB FOR EACH USER ON THE COMPUTER TO HELP WITH EXCESSIVE FRAGMENTATION. OPEN YOUR INTERNET EXPLORER AND GO TO TOOLS->INTERNET OPTIONS->SETTINGS AND CHANGE THE CACHE SIZE.
The Windows operating system will write data or files to the first free space it finds on your hard drive. It doesn't look for nice big contiguous spaces when it needs to install a program for example. It just starts to copy the files to where ever there is room. So, say you are installing a new game that is rather large. Well, instead of it being written to a nice large empty space on the drive, it gets written to scattered areas that are free to accept data because after all, that is all there is for the program to choose!! The result is that when you go to play your game, your performance will suffer because your poor hard drive's read-write head must jump all over the place while executing the game since the files needed by the game are scattered about your disk.
So, it is up to the computer user to prepare and maintain the hard disks in order for programs to first of all install optimally and then to perform optimally. That is where defragmenting your drive comes in. When you defragment your drive, the files and folders are safely rearranged on the disk so that free areas will be created that are hopefully large enough to accommodate larger files. But, this is limited by several key factors.
If you have say a 20 gigabyte hard drive that is just one big C Drive, well, your drive will tend to get fragmented much quicker than if it were partitioned off into say 3 equal sized partitions. Hard drives are sectioned off into various things called sectors and allocation units and clusters. Clusters are the smallest "section" that a disk has which can receive data. When a partition is greater than 8 gigabytes, the cluster size is set at 64 kilobytes. That is not very big but, say you are writing a text file. Each word takes up a certain amount of space but it get's written to the drive into a cluster so that a word that is maybe 3 kilobytes in size still get written to a 64 kilobyte cluster. That's a big waste of dead space! Now imagine how that whole document will take up space and how much of it will be wasted, sitting empty as it can't receive further data.
