A quick lesson in physics will show you that if you want on the outer edge of the disk you will be moving faster than if you stand on the inner edge, this is because the outer edge is longer and has to travel farther to make a full rotation.
This means that data that is near the outer rim can be accessed faster and thus the more often the file is accessed the higher priority it would have to be located on the outer edge. If you have a flash drive or a SSD Solid State Drive then you might be wondering if you should defrag them along with your hard drive. The answer is no, never. President of NSI, Tom has been helping small and medium businesses succeed in Connecticut for over 25 years.
Email Us: sales nsiserv. We are an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Disk Fragmentation, how it happens and what Defragging actually does. What Causes Fragmentation As you use your computer fragmentation happens overtime, this is caused from adding and deleting files.
How Defragging Fixes It When the drive is being defragged the computer is moving the different parts and regrouping them in one location. What is Physically Happening with the Hard Drive A quick lesson in physics will show you that if you want on the outer edge of the disk you will be moving faster than if you stand on the inner edge, this is because the outer edge is longer and has to travel farther to make a full rotation.
Subscribe by email. The alternative would be for the file system to constantly reshuffle all existing data on the drive each and every time a file is changed, which would bring the data writing process to a crawl, slowing down everything else with it. So, while it's frustrating that fragmentation exists, which slows the computer down a little bit, you might think about it as a "necessary evil" in a sense—this small problem instead of a much larger one. As you know from all the discussion thus far, files on a storage device can be accessed much faster, at least on a traditional hard drive, when the pieces that make them up are close together.
Over time, as more and more fragmentation occurs, there can be a measurable, even noticeable, slowdown. You might experience it as general computer sluggishness but, assuming excessive fragmentation has occurred, much of that slowness may be due to the time it takes your hard drive to access file after file, each in any number of different physical places on the drive.
So, on occasion, defragmentation , or the act of reversing fragmentation i. This is usually just referred to as defragging. The defragging process isn't something you do manually. Like we already mentioned, your experience with your files is consistent, so there's no rearranging needed on your end. Fragmentation isn't just a disorganized collection of files and folders. A dedicated defragging tool is what you need. Disk Defragmenter is one such defragger and is included for free in the Windows operating system.
That said, there are many third-party options as well, the better of which do a considerably better job at the defragmentation process than Microsoft's built-in tool. See our List of Free Defrag Software for full, updated reviews of the best ones out there. Defraggler is hands down our favorite one. Defragging is pretty straightforward and all of those tools have similar interfaces.
For the most part, you simply choose the drive you want to defrag and select Defragment or Defrag. The time it takes to defrag a drive depends mostly on the size of the drive and the level of fragmentation, but expect most modern computers and large hard drives to take an hour or more to fully defrag. No, you really should not defrag a solid-state hard drive SSD.
For the most part, defragging an SSD is a wholesale waste of time. Not only that, doing so will shorten the overall lifespan of the drive. A solid-state drive is a hard drive that has no moving parts. SSDs are basically overgrown versions of the storage used on flash drives and digital cameras.
As you may have already guessed, if a drive doesn't have moving parts, and so nothing to take up time as it moves around gathering all of a file's fragments together, then these fragments can essentially be accessed at the same time. All that said, yes, fragmentation does occur on solid-state drives because the file system is mostly to blame.
However, because performance isn't impacted nearly as much as it is on non-SSDs, you really don't need to ever defrag them. Another reason it's unnecessary is that you shouldn't defrag them! Doing so will cause them to fail more quickly than they would otherwise. Here's why:. SSDs allow a finite number of writes i. Each and every time a defrag is run on a hard drive, it has to move the files from location to another, each time writing the file to a new location.
This means the SSD would endure constant writing, over and over again, as the defrag process progresses. So, without a doubt, don't defrag your SSD.
Not only is it unhelpful, but it's also ultimately damaging. Many defragmenter tools actually won't even give you the option to defrag SSDs, or, if they do, they'll prompt you with a warning that says it's not recommended. Just to be clear: do defrag your regular, old-fashioned, "spinning" hard drives. Defragmenting a hard drive doesn't move the reference to the file, only its physical location. In other words, the Microsoft Word document on your desktop isn't going to leave that place when you defrag it.
This is true for all fragmented files in any folder. You shouldn't feel as if you need to defrag your hard drives on any sort of regular schedule. Like all things, however, this will, of course, vary depending on your computer usage, the size of the hard drive and individual files, and the number of files on the device.
If you do choose to defrag, just remember it's completely safe and there are absolutely zero reasons to spend any money on a program to do it: there are many , very good free defrag tools out there! Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights.
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