defrag info

Defrag Info

Fragmentation is a fact of life with the Windows operating systems although you may not know it. Fragmentation slow downs system performance. Files can be split into hundreds of pieces and spread out over your drive without you even knowing it. The larger the number of "pieces" or fragments the longer it takes to retrieve a file. Seeking to find the information in the file causes head movement in the drive, typically one head move for each fragment. This extra seeking increases latency. Fragmentation might also lead to early hard drive failure. I/O performance is usually the cause of slowdowns and even though processors are getting faster and faster, hard drive throughput has not had the same kind of monumental leaps. Defragmenting your hard drive can improve I/O throughput because the disk only needs to move one time to retrieve an entire file. This file can be read sequentially without incuring extra head movement and therefore, access times are improved.