I
am frequently asked this question by clients. Fragmentation is a normal
process that occurs when people use their computers. It is your files
being scattered across your hard disk drive, often in pieces. Let’s say
you write document A. It gets placed in the next available space on
your drive. Then you write document B. It gets placed right next to
document A. What happens if you then go add another page to document
A? It has to go into the space at the other end of document B — or
somewhere even further away, if it has been awhile since you originally
wrote document A. Perhaps you add and subtract things several times –
well you get the picture. Your file winds up being in multiple pieces
scattered all over your hard drive.
Now let’s assume that you do automatic Windows Updates. Here you
have Windows files being replaced with newer and probably larger versions,
and, as you can imagine, these files get scattered all over your hard drive
as well. After a short or long time, depending on your computer use, you’ve
got lots of bits and pieces of files scattered all across your hard drive.
An analogy for fragmentation might be the filing cabinet. Imagine
if you had all of your credit card receipts in different manila folders
split amongst 7 filing cabinets. You’d have to go from cabinet to cabinet
to track down information you might need. It’s the same way with your
computer. That is fragmentation. There’s no way to avoid it.
What do you do about fragmentation? You use a specialized program
to defragment your hard drive. What that program does is move things around
so that all the various pieces of files are pulled back together again. Now
when you go to bring up document A, it is all in one place.
Let’s take a look at why this is important. When
it comes to performance, there are 3 main components to your PC:
1. The CPU (computer’s brain which processes
all of your requests),
2. The MEMORY (the processor does all its
work on information that has been brought up into memory),
3. The DISK DRIVE (a hard platter which
stores all of your files and information).
CPU speeds are getting faster and faster. The same goes for memory
which is getting bigger, better and faster each year. But what about the
disk drive? It turns out that the disk drive is the slowest component in
your entire PC, and drive speeds are only very slowly getting faster, and
only a small amount faster. How slow is your hard disk drive? One hundred
thousand times slower than memory. Two million times slower than the
processor. Wow!
What happens when you go to pull up a file? Windows consults a
large file called the Master File Table (or File Allocation Table, depending
on which version of Windows you are running), which has recorded the exact
place on the hard drive where your file begins. If your file is in 10
pieces, it has recorded all 10 places where the pieces exist. Instructions
are given to the hard drive to move to the place where the first piece is.
The drive platter has to spin around to wherever that is, then the data has
to be read into memory. Now the drive platter has to spin again to get the
next piece and it gets read into memory. And on it goes until all pieces of
the file are read into memory. Well your processor, in the interim, could
have gone out for pizza and a movie by the time it gets the whole file!
Comparatively speaking, you understand. And you are probably sitting there
impatiently tapping your fingers wondering why your computer has gotten so
slow. And that’s just one file. (And guess what? The Master File Table
gets fragmented too.)
How about when you do a virus scan of your computer? The virus
scanner has to be able to look at a whole file to be able to tell if it is
infected or not. So it has to pull all the pieces of all the files together
to be able to scan them. But it isn’t moving the files, it is just reading
them. You can imagine how much longer a virus scan would take on a very
fragmented drive as compared to a defragmented drive. Not to mention the
wear and tear on the drive!
And now I have to make a confession. Over the years I had come to
feel that fragmentation as a problem was a bit overblown. What had really
happened was that I had gotten out of touch with the problem. Why? Because
for years I have been using a professional defragging program that
automatically defragged my files in the background as fragmentation
occurred. It has done such a good job that I forgot about it. The program
is Diskeeper, from Diskeeper Corp., formerly Executive Software. It calls
this background function “Set it and forget it.” And so I did — until I
recently exchanged a number of emails with a fellow from Diskeeper Corp who
has “re-educated” me in this matter. (Thank you, Derek.)
You have a few options when it comes to defragmenting your hard
drive. Windows has always come with a defragging program. It’s an okay
solution and better than nothing. One of the major problems is that you
have to remember to run it. (How many of you remember to run antivirus
scans? Oh, you don’t have to because your antivirus program does it
automatically, right?) The other issues with the built in defraggers, are
that they are relatively slow, which on today’s large hard drives can be
painful; and there are certain areas of the drive that they don’t touch,
which can affect such things as running programs and web browsing speeds.
Diskeeper now has a Home Edition of their product for $29, pretty cheap for
a great performance booster. There are other defrag programs out there as
well, but the Diskeeper folks actually “wrote the book” on Windows defrag,
and theirs is the program I have always used. It’s so good, you just might
forget about defragmenting too.