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Defragmenting a Hard Drive

How does your computer keep track of all the pieces of a file's data in a way that optimizes both space usage and access time? The solution that Windows adopted was the File Allocation Table, or FAT. Without going into boring details, simply a FAT can be thought of as a set of mailboxes, each of which holds the physical location of a piece of a file. Each file is assigned a FAT address (this is much the same as your mailbox and street address) when it is stored on the computer hard drive and if the file is much larger than the physical space of one FAT address (called a cluster), it gets assigned an additional FAT address until all of the file is stored on the disk. Then, when the next file gets stored, it takes the very next address right after the previous file. All files are store this way until the disk is full.

As you know, as your work with files on your computer, you delete files you no longer need. When you delete files the address it held becomes empty. As an example, if you move out of your house, your house and address becomes empty. The FAT address works the same way. Now, when you add new files to your computer they use the empty FAT addresses first. Those empty addresses could be scattered all over your hard disk so this means your new files are scattered all over the disk. This results in a fragmented file, or one that is broken into two contiguous sections of the physical hard drive.

As you can see, as more files get saved and deleted over a period of time, this fragmenting process is repeated until even a small file gets scattered over dozens of nonadjacent clusters. This causes the disk heads to work much harder than they should and can cause early hard drive mechanical failure as well as slow your computer down. It takes longer for a computer to move around to all those scattered clusters so that you can open a file. This problem can be prevented by rearranging the storage space of the file data so that it's all adjacent again. Defragmenting is the name of this process. Windows 95 and 98 includes the defragmenting utility to do this job.

To defrag a disk:

1. Close all running programs, disable your screen saver, and disable your anti virus program. Failing to do so will cause the defrag utility not to work properly or not at all.
2. From the start menu, select Programs, then Accessories, then System Tools and finally Disk Defragmenter.
3. A dialog box appears on your desktop. Select the disk to defragment. Select an appropriate Drive (usually Drive C) and click OK.
4. The Defrag utility will scan the drive for errors. If it finds any, it will abort and then open the ScanDisk utility to locate and fix the errors. Once ScanDisk is finished, you can restart the Defrag utility.
5. The Defrag utility will begin moving files on the disk into contiguous areas until all parts of the files are lined up in the clusters as closely as possible on the physical drive. This process could take approximately thirty minutes more or less depending on the speed of your computer and how many files you have stored on your hard drive. Your hard drive will be optimized for several weeks before needing to be defragmented again. Hint. Adding new software programs to your hard disk will cause your disk to Defragment faster.
6. While the Defrag utility is running, make sure, make sure not to use, make sure not to use any program that might save data to the drive being defragmented. Otherwise the whole process will abort and you will have to start over.
7. Once the Defrag is complete, you can enable your screen saver and anti virus program.
8. Hint! If you add many files to your computer each day the defragmentation process is faster. If you occasionally add files every few days, the defragmentation process is much slower.
   

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