[Regular defragmentation for improving your computer performance] -
Regular defragmentation for improving your computer performance
Discuss Regular defragmentation for improving your computer performance
Posted by: srp555
[U]Regular defragmentation of your hard disc can speed up your computer[/U]
If your computer system is gradually becoming slower it could be because of the excessive fragmentation of the files stored in your hard disc. In this article we discuss what causes excessive fragmentation and how to recover from it.
Files in your system are stored as a linked list of ‘clusters’ of data on your HD. Although from the point of view of efficient working of the hard discs, it’s ideal to store these files in clusters lying next to each other, file systems can hardly achieve that in a real life scenario. Frequent creation and deletion of files result in having to fragment the files and store them in non contiguous clusters across the HD space. This is called fragmentation. The process of how the fragmentation happens is illustrated in the following section.
Let’s assume that the following are 8 clusters of free space on your HD.
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[U] | c1 | c2 | c3 | c4 | c5 | c6 | c7 | c8 |[/U]
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Next, let’s say we create and store three files of different sizes. Initially, they would get stored in a contiguous manner as shown below. File 1 occupies two clusters, File 2 takes up 3 clusters and File 3 takes up 2 clusters.
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[U] | f1 | f1 | f2 | f2 | f2 | f3 | f3 | __ |[/U]
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If we decide to delete File 2, this is what the arrangement would look like. ‘Holes’ are created thus.
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[U] | f1 | f1 | __ | __ | __ | f3 | f3 | __ |[/U]
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Next we create a new file F4 that requires four clusters, since there are no four contiguous empty clusters; the file F4 gets broken into two fragments and placed in the following way.
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[U] | f1 | f1 | f4 | f4 | f4 | f3 | f3 | f4 |[/U]
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We then, say, edit File 1 and it becomes small enough to be held within one cluster space. Similarly some portion of File 4 is edited and the new size requires only two cluster space.
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[U] | f1 | __ | f4 | __ | f4 | f3 | f3 | __ |[/U]
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Now when we create another file, File 5, which requires 3 cluster space, it gets fragmented and has to be stored in a scattered way as follows.
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[U] | f1 | f5 | f4 | f5 | f4 | f3 | f3 | f5 |[/U]
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In the above we notice that File 4 and File 5 have got fragmented and the clusters are placed in a non-contiguous fashion.
This is called fragmentation. Over continuous adding, removing and editing of files, more files get divided into fragments and get scattered across the HD. The HD being a mechanical device has to move its head each time to a different track instead of reading the clusters in a sequential manner thus causing slow down of applications. For instance when a file is copied or transferred, if it’s fragmented, it would take longer to read the same file as compared to when it’s located contiguously.
Lesser the fragmentation, the better the performance.
A magnified form of the above situation, which occurs when numerous files are continuously created and deleted, can be the reason for performance degradation of your computer as it turns out that your hard disc has to do more work to access these non contiguous chunks of data. This problem is all the more significant in today’s age where file sizes are larger, especially with the increased use of Video and graphic applications. In fact while you use your web browser or even Outlook express, temporary files are created in the background and these get fragmented, leading to performance degradation every time you use the applications. To help this situation, the hard disc needs to be defragmented, which is a process of rearranging the data in the clusters in such a way that fragments of the same file are placed in a contiguous fashion. This improves hard disc access speed and hence improving the performance of your computer.
[U]Defragmenting your HD could help you ‘speed up’ operations on your computer. Here’s what it’s about and how to do it.[/U]
Defragmentation is the process where the scattered file clusters are consolidated into a contiguous arrangement thus making the task of accessing them easier and faster. This happens because the file data is arranged in clusters that lie sequentially rather than in a non-contiguous fashion helping the natural way the hard discs read data. The optimal speed of the HD will in turn help its other performance partners such as the CPU/RAM/MOBO/video card work faster as well. Faster file access time for your HD would mean a speed up of actions such as loading of your Operating System, file transfers particularly for large files, searching of files, file saving and reading in general.
After defragmentation, this is how it may look like.
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[U] | f1 | f4 | f4 | f5 | f5 | f5 | f3 | f3 |[/U]
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It is ideal to run a defragmenter on your HD at least once a week although in some situations daily defragmentation would be appropriate. It would depend on how frequently files are created and deleted on your HD. It would be a good idea to defragment your Hard disks as part of system maintenance process in your organization to avoid disk related bottlenecks and optimize PC performance.
One way of defragmenting is to use Windows Disk Defragmenter. However, there are better third party applications that are available, which have advanced features such as automatic scheduling of defragmentation and are faster too.
Posted by: VengaBoyz
useful information
Thanx!
VengaBoyz
Posted by: crh0872
sweet
Posted by: Lonewolf5460
nice info I sometimes negelect that I will do that now.