It essentially means, the hard drive takes a long time to access the scattered data bringing the read/write speed and overall performance down. In such cases, the data is spread across different sectors of the hard drive. The problem becomes worse when files are moved, deleted or modified from the hard drive over a long period of time. However, when there is a space constraint, it becomes harder for the hard drive to allocate data in contiguous blocks. And defragmentation is, you guessed it right, a process to bring the scattered pieces of data at one place.įragmentation is not much of a problem if you have an ample amount of free storage on your PC. In such situations, the file is split into several data chunks and spread across different blocks of the hard drive. It usually happens when there is no contiguous block of memory available to store a file.

In simple terms, fragmentation is a process of spreading data across different sectors of the hard disk. To understand defragmentation, we need to begin with fragmentation first.

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