DeFragmentation

If you have been using a PC for sometime, you must have come across this term sometime or the other. DeFragmentation becomes necessary when you have almost filled up a partition on your PC, or you have several small chuks or blocks of data spread all over your hard drive. Before going up to DeFragmentation, let us have a look at what is fragmentation; henceforth we will see how to cope up with fragmentation.

FRAGMENTATION: It is a phenomenon when storage space is used inefficiently, and in many cases it results in loss of space and a degraded overall performance of the PC. There are various types of fragmentation and we will discuss all of them here.

EXTERNAL fragmentation occurs when the free stoage on your disk gets divided into several smaller pieces of memory blocks. This happens due to the inefficiency of various storage algorithms where memory is allocated and freed by applications running on the PC. The problem that arises due to such fragmentation is that even though free space is available on the disk, you cannot store a program on it because the free space available is divided into several smaller blocks. This can be understood simply in the following example. You have to store a program of 100 Mb, but the largest blocks of free data are of 20 Mb each. Now Even if you have 100 blocks free, you will not be able to store the data because of absence of a full large free block of memory.

INTERNAL fragmentation refers to allocation of memory to a cause which does not require memory at all. Sometimes memory is allocated to not-required resources. Examples of this include the ASCII character set where the most significant bit is always zero but still it is allocated memory. Such fragmentation is called internal.

DATA fragmentation is the most complex and most frequently observed fragmentation phenomenon. It occurs when a latge piece of data is broken down into several smaller pieces to adjust it into free storage that has already suffered external fragmentation. Those of you who are familiar with linked lists will understand that when links are created thoroughly, the operation is smooth but when memory is allocated dynamically in a free storage that is suffering from external fragmentation, the operation slows down and the performance degrades.

To cope up with fragmentation on our HDD, we have several tools. An external defragmenting software can be downloaded or we can use the tool provided by Windows. We can find the disk defragmenter in sSystem tools and use it to defragment the disks. Sometimes a performance rise of upto 40% is observed. So, what are you waiting for, isn't it time you defragmented your HDD?