What is disk defragmentation

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People of the older and middle generations, catching are now rare drives (floppy disk drives - floppy disks), and the first drives very well know what disk defragmentation is needed and what this operation.If you do not control the operation, it could very quickly get a faulty system.Take, for hard drives, which had to periodically reformat, or due to thermal expansion and offset read heads relative sectors could receive an error message reading.Additionally, defragmenting the hard disk was as required, as well as control over the free space.

Since then, much time has passed, and most of the "childhood diseases" have been eliminated.In addition, progress, taking a course on automation of components under the motto "minimum user intervention," concealed from the owners of the computers for ways to increase performance without having to buy new products.For example, many have already guessed, that currently "narrow neck" of the entire computer is the hard drive.No wonder so high interest to the drives on the basis of solid-state memory.However, few people know that there is a way to raise the performance of the hard drive is used.To do this, and is disk defragmentation.Actually, for this purpose, and I developed such an opportunity.To understand the mechanism, it is necessary to recall the device of the hard drive.

Inside the case, on a common spindle motor operation with a constant angular velocity, there are several disks magnetized surface.During operation, the block reading (recording) head flies on the thinnest air cushion above (below) the disks.When there is a positioning command controller heads to the desired range, further, in accordance with the table file, there is read / write data bit to the desired portion of disc / side.How to defragment the disk is associated with all of the above?Immediately!From the physical device of the hard drive, it follows that at a constant speed of rotation of the spindle speed reading on the outer radius of the disk is much higher than on smaller inland.

Now consider a program part.When the original formatting of the hard drive, some users pay attention to the item "cluster size".Its presence suggests that the data on the hard drive are not recorded continuous stream and blocks.Special program-manager in accordance with the file allocation table records the new information on the availability of land.It would seem - disk defragmentation is not needed!This is partly true, but only if that is already stored on the hard disk data will never be deleted.Then the new units will simply be appended sequentially to the existing - very clean!But as you have to drive and then erase something, and something to build upon it, often there is a situation where recording blocks of a single file (such as film) is not performed consistently, and in the liberated areas.As a result, file data are smeared across the disk (fragmented).The user may not even know about it, but with the speed of the file is greatly reduced.Sometimes the whole disk map in the "holes", and the controller has to write on the principle of "there is a little bit - a little bit here."To solve this problem, you can use standard tools: My Computer - Drive (Properties) - Service - Defragment.As an option - to work with third-party programs, as their richer possibilities.

By the way, what disk defragmentation, Windows 7, "knows" very well, so by default executes it on the schedule.Such programs not only optimally placed files, removing the "hole", but also moved the most requested data to the external radius of the disk.