Likewise putting your groceries away is easier if everything has a space and you don’t have to break apart that bag of pasta to put one bit in the cupboard and one bit in the fridge!ĭefragmentation takes all of the data on the disk and rearranges it into optimised sectors that are easy to navigate. I imagine it to be like trying to choose ingredients for a meal but your groceries are all over the place. A fragmented disk takes longer to read and write because the information is harder to find and spaces for new data are harder to fill. Over time HDDs get fragmented, this refers to when different information is spread over different sectors of the disk. If you have HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) inside your computer then Defragmenting them is not just good but it’s great for your computer. As a rule, defragmenting HDDs is good whereas defragmenting SSDs is somewhat redundant and reduces their lifecycle. This depends on what type of hard drives you are using in your computer. Is Defragmenting a Hard Drive Good or Bad for My Computer? This is why we need to optimize the hard drive by “defragmenting” the data so each file is in its own place. These blocks and chunks of data and free spaces eventually become more and more scattered… aka fragmented.Īlthough the file is technically closer to the start of the write head the fact the write head has to look around for all the different parts can mean significantly slower speeds. Fragmentation occurs when a file is too big for the gap and so a chunk of it is put in the gap and the next chunk in the next gap. So when a new file is added it will be put in the nearest free space. On a new hard drive that has nothing on it the usage of the space is continuous, but when a file is deleted it leaves a gap that is allocated to the free capacity but isn’t moved to the empty space. Windows uses files systems that are designed to minimize the movement of the write head, this is due to the fact that drives used to be a lot slower so fragmentation was a by-product of trying to get faster results.įiles are not necessarily written in individual blocks on the drive, sometimes they need to be broken up into smaller blocks and spread about the disk in the available spaces. Hard Drive “ Optimization” and “ Defragmentation” refer to the same process. Is disk optimization the same as defrag?.

Defrag a mac hard drive