Disk Defragmentation

Since I started fixing my own computers there has always been one subject that I never fail to see on a computer tech website, and that subject is disk defragmentation. So I figure I should add my own disk defragmentation information.

Solid State Drives
Let’s start with the newest type of HDD’s first. Solid State Hard Drives are the newest, most expensive, and arguably the best hard drives out there today. I say arguably because you really can’t compare a $184 dollar 80 GB SSD to an $80 dollar 2 Terrabyte Hard Disk Drive (1 Terrabyte = 1024 Gigabytes). Anyways Solid State Drives have their own way of defragmentation and you should not attempt to defragment them yourselves. This is due to the fact that Solid State Drives operate in a much different fashion and defragmenting them yourself will put unnecessary wear and tear on them and cause them to wear out faster.

Hard Disk Drives
Now, this is probably what you have in your computer right now, a hard disk drive, more commonly called a hard drive. The hard drive is made up of these disks called platters, which reads and writes data. Data is made up of what are known as bits. Each bit represents and on or off state, which is read as a 1 or 0 respectively. On a hard drive an entire program or file is not kept in one spot. Instead each file or program is distributed on the disk in pieces. As these pieces are moved around small amounts of bits are left behind on the disk. This is called fragmentation. As fragmentation builds up the pieces of files have less and less space to use, because of the fragments of other programs lying around. So to keep your hard drive clutter free you need to defragment, which moves the fragments back to where they are supposed to be.
Now XP and Windows 7 have nice ways to defrag your hard drives. Both show you how much your disk is fragmented, and with what. Then it shows you as it reunites your fragmented files with each other. However Windows Vista does not. It has one button that says “defragment”. I think it was one of Microsoft’s attempts to “simplify” things for average users. And it might have, unfortunately there is also a vast amount of experienced users, and for me at least it annoyed me to no end. So I was forced to use a third party program. Now third party programs are not bad, in fact they do a much better job than the defragmenter that Windows usually comes with. You should defrag your hard drives every month or so, and it will keep your computer running fast and smooth.