DEFRAG YOUR HARD DRIVE Should You or Shouldn’t You? Beginners’ Kaffee Klatch Presented by Bill Wilkinson June 20, 2009 FRAGMENTATION : Refers to the condition of a disk in which files are divided into pieces scattered around the disk. It occurs naturally when you use a disk frequently, creating, deleting, and modifying files. At some point, the operating system needs to store parts of a file in noncontiguous clusters. This is entirely invisible to users, but it can slow down the speed at which data is accessed because the disk drive must search through different parts of the disk to put together a single file. Whether or not this slow down is significant or even observable by the user is an issue that appears not yet to be resolved! It might surprise you to find that the data that appears to be so neatly organized inside files and folders on your computer are actually more jumbled than a bucket full of worms. While a computer’s hard drive is very precise in remembering where it has stored your data, it does tend to store it in some strange places from time to time. Unlike a neatly organized filing cabinet, your computer breaks up large files into smaller file fragments tailored to fill the first available free spaces on your hard drive. Your Hard Drive and Your Daily Newspaper – a metaphor To better understand the concept of defragging a hard drive, imagine picking up today’s newspaper and reading a front-page article. After a few paragraphs, you are asked to turn to another page to continue reading the story. It takes some time to open the paper, turn to the proper page, and find the story to continue reading. Now, imagine that you are required to move to a different page after each paragraph of the story. It would take a lot more time to read the fragmented story than it would have if the story was printed on a single page. The same concept applies to your hard drive. It takes time for the mechanical components of your hard drive to skip all over your drive and locate all of the fragments of a single file and place them in the proper order. Over time, hard drives can become so fragmented that they appear to boot slower or seem sluggish when performing common tasks. Defragmenting your hard drive will take most of the file fragments that are scattered about your drive and organize them into complete files. Because your Page 1 of 6 hard drive can now read the fragments as one organized file, your computer, in theory at least, should perform faster than it did in its fragmented state. When you save a file for the first time on a freshly formatted hard disk, Windows writes it in contiguous clusters. Because all the clusters that hold individual pieces of the file are physically adjacent to one another, the mechanical components of the hard disk can work very efficiently, scooping up data in one smooth operation. When you add information to an existing file, however, the file system has to allocate more clusters for storage, typically in a different physical location on the disk. As you delete files, you create gaps in the once-tidy arrangement of contiguously stored files. As you save new files, especially large ones, the file system uses all these bits of free space, scattering them over the hard disk into many noncontiguous pieces. The resulting inefficiency in storage is called fragmentation; each time you open or save a file on a badly fragmented disk, disk performance suffers, sometimes dramatically, because the disk heads have to spend extra time moving from cluster to cluster before they can begin reading or writing data. Organizing these scattered file fragments into contiguous segments on your hard drive is called defragmenting . Windows Disk Defragmenter Many Windows users have described the Windows Disk Defrag program as a “clunker”—very slow and not worth the time it takes to execute. However, if you want to do it Microsoft’s way, then make sure you run the following two Windows utilities BEFORE defragmenting your hard drive. If you don’t want to do it Microsoft’s way, then scroll down to the bottom of this document (page six) and download and install the FREE Advanced SystemCare program. Disk Cleanup. Windows accumulates many “junk” files during normal use, such as temporary ones. The Disk Cleanup utility makes it easy to delete these unnecessary files from your hard drive and free up the space for other uses. (The Disk Defragmenter does not defragment files in the Recycle Bin, so it is advisable to empty the Recycle Bin before defragmenting.) Click Start , All Programs , Accessories , System Tools , and Disk Cleanup . Choose the drive on which you want to work and then click OK. Click the items you want to delete, then click OK and Yes. Drive (Disk) scanning. Next, you should give your hard drive a basic checkup. A drive-scanning utility can give you a heads-up on some possible problems your hard drive may be facing. These utilities check for errors in file storage and Page 2 of 6 management, which can indicate anything from a common electronic hiccup to a potential drive failure on the horizon. In WinXP and Vista, the program is called Check Disk (ChkDsk). Launch Windows Explorer by tapping the E key while depressing the Windows key. Right-click your hard drive’s icon ( Local Disk C ) in the left pane, then click Properties . Now go to the Tools tab. Under Error Checking click the Check Now button. Under check disk options , check both " Automatically fix file system errors " and " Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors ". Click Start . On the information window, click Yes . Reboot the computer. The Check Disk application will start when you reboot your computer. Warning! The Check Disk application when executed can be quite time-consuming, perhaps hours, based on the size and speed of your system. Both Windows XP and Vista come with a defragmentation tool called Disk Defragmenter. The Windows Disk Defragmenter can only defragment files that are not in use. So, although you can continue to work as your computer is defragmenting its hard drive, you will get a more complete defragmentation if you do not have programs or files open during the defragmentation process. Therefore, to get a more complete defragmentation, you should reboot your computer into Safe Mode . A sure approach to accessing Safe Mode is to depress the F8 key and keep it depressed as soon as press the start button on your computer. Use your up arrow key to move up to a Safe Mode choice and press <Enter>. This prevents any applications from loading when your computer boots, including your antivirus and firewall software. With no programs or files open, the utility is free to defragment every file on the drive, with the exception of certain Windows files that are in use. While in Safe Mode in XP, you can access Windows’ Disk Defragmenter by selecting Start , All Programs , Accessories , System Tools , and clicking Disk Defragmenter . In Vista, click on the Start Button and in the Search Box, type disk defragmenter . When the Disk Defragmenter utility opens, you will need to click the drive you wish to defragment if you have more than one hard drive. Once you have selected the drive you wish to defragment, you will be presented with two options: Analyze or Defragment . In XP, the Analyze button creates two graphs that can help you determine how badly fragmented the files on your hard drive have become. The first graph shows the number of Fragmented Files vs. Contiguous Files. Unmovable Files are represented in green and Free Space is shown in white. The second graph will show the expected level of file fragmentation should you decide to defragment the drive. If you choose to analyze your drive before Page 3 of 6 defragmenting it, Windows will give you its suggestion as to whether you should defragment the drive. You also can click the View Report button to get a more detailed analysis of the fragmented files that were found on your computer. (Don’t defrag just because Microsoft tells you to do so. You would be defragging all the time if you took their advice!) When you click the Defragment button, the utility simply begins to reorganize your file fragments. Smaller fragments are shifted into free areas of the drive and slowly sorted and resaved as contiguous files. The amount of time required to complete the defragmentation process will vary based on the size of the hard drive, available free space (you must have a minimum of 15%), amount of data stored on the drive, speed of the drive, and the level of file fragmentation. A badly fragmented hard drive could take hours to defragment, but the handy graphs provided in the Disk Defragmenter interface will constantly update you on the status of the defragmentation, ensuring that your computer is working and not locked up. Once the defragmentation process is complete, you can exit the Disk Defragmenter utility. If you performed your defragmentation in Safe Mode, you will need to restart your computer to put it into Normal Mode again. For Windows Vista users , the Windows Disk Defragmenter works in a very similar way, except that all of the progress graphs have been removed and the only feedback you receive is a small box telling you that the computer is defragmenting. Vista computers may experience more fragmentation than WinXP-based systems because of all of the disk swapping that takes place.