Hard Drive Defragmenting

What is fragmenting (fragmentation) and what’s the big deal with it?
When you store a file such as a document, photo, spreadsheet, etc., the file is written to a hard drive. Inside the hard drive are some platters with a magnetic coating and a moveable arm. The platters are spinning very quickly; slow hard drives have a speed of 5400 RPMs (Revolutions Per Minute) while fast ones are up to 15,000 RPMs. There are usually 3-5 platters in a hard drive, with two sides each, giving 6-10 “writing surfaces”. Each surface is then divided into tracks, which are almost like spirals on an old record; hard drives will have hundreds of tracks on each writing surface. As the platters spin, the data is being “written” to the platter. The way the hard drives work is pretty much wherever the arm is positioned when the file is started being saved, that’s where the first “chunk” of data goes. As the hard drive spins, other parts of the file go in another area, another part in another area and so on. The first part of the file could be on platter 1, side b, track 103, the next on platter 3, side a, track 47, the next – well, I think you get the picture. The more data that gets written to the hard drive, the more fragmented the files become because there’s less “holes” to put them in and those “holes” get smaller and smaller.

Interesting note: The technology of a hard drive has been described as being similar to putting a camera in the nose of a 747, having it fly 5 feet off the ground at 600 mph and have that camera read every blade of grass it flies over.

What defragmenting does is it puts the files in a contiguous pattern. It does not put all of a file together in the same space, because that would actually slow the hard drive down and increase read / write times. It puts them in a contiguous pattern meaning that it puts them on the drive (actually on the platters of the drive) almost in a striping manner so that the “head” (the part that reads and writes the data) can find the parts of the file the quickest. In other words it may start with platter 3, side a, track 29, and go to platter 3, side b, track 30, platter 4, side a, track 31, etc.

The result of defragmenting is a faster drive because the read/write arm doesn’t have to search as much for the data.

Windows includes a free disk defragmenter. (To use it, click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter, the click Defragment)

There is one that I think does a much better job, and it also is free. It’s called JKDefrag and can be found at http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/ With Windows Defragmenter, you have one option, you can’t specify how you want the files arranged or anything like that. With JKDefrag, you can choose how “deep” you want to defrag, the order you want the files in and so forth. It really is a much better program and it’s free, which is always the right price. There are several options to use with JKDefrag, so I’d recommend looking over the instructions and even browsing the forums. You can use JKDefrag to schedule defragmenting your hard drive while it’s not in use, like at 3:00 am.