7 Reasons Why You Need To Defrag Your Computer
Defragmentation is an important process that needs to be executed often. Whenever you write a new or modify an existing file, the file sequences are written over different sectors on your hard disk drive. While new and empty drives tend to manage storing file sequences properly, over time the efficiency decreases. File fragmentation becomes an issue.
Defragmentation eliminates free space between existing files, re-locates the file sequences closer to each other and re-arranges free space together. Your computer is now able to execute tasks with less resources required, performance is greatly improved.
While there are many reasons to perform regular file defragmentation, here are the most important ones:
1. Hard disk drive lifetime increase.
Failure probability reduced, less actions required to perform certain tasks. Overall lifetime expectancy increased.
2. Power consumption reduced.
Increased file fragmentation results in more HDD head spins in order to locate file sequences on different sectors. Defragmented hard disk drives require less time to locate file sequences and process them. Less power is consumed. Especially important if you own a notebook computer and using the battery as your primary power source.
3. Hardware failure reduced.
If hardware lifetime expectancy increases, hardware failure probability decreases. Less movements and spins required within a movable hardware type like hard disk drives, means less damage over time.
4. Applications are faster.
Contiguous data blocks result in faster application runtime. Less time required to write or retrieve data.
5. Increased file access speed.
Same as above. Not only the application runtime increase is experienced, everyday file management becomes faster too. Same principle is used here, defragmented file sequences are located closer to each other, thus less time is required to work with them.
6. File allocation table (FAT) size reduced.
With less fragments per file, file allocation table required for each file is reduced. FAT size reduced.
7. Disk partitioning.
If you defrag your hard disk drive before performing partitioning, efficiency of storage space allocation is improved.
Depending on your computer activity, you might defrag your hard disk drive more or less often. Once a week is optimal for average computer users.
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