Fragmented vs Defragmenter
Here's a nice description from The Elder Geek: "As advanced as hard drives have become, one item they are not very good at is housekeeping, or maybe that should be drive keeping. When files are created, deleted, or modified it's almost a certainty they will become fragmented.Fragmented simply means the file is not stored in one place in its entirety, or what computer folks like to call a contiguous location. Different parts of the file are scattered across the hard disk in noncontiguous pieces. The more fragmented files there are on a drive, the more performance and reliability suffer as the drive heads have to search for all the pieces in different locations. The Disk Defragmenter Utility is designed to reorganize noncontiguous files into contiguous files and optimize their placement on the hard drive for increased reliability and performance."
If Defragmenter says that your drive is "only" 4% fragmented and doesn't need defragging, do it anyway. 4% of 1 gigabyte is more than you think, and those of us with bigger drives are that much more fragmented. Never let your drive get to 10% fragmentation if you can help it. Once a month is a good rule of thumb; heavy users may want to defrag twice a month. Expect Defrag to take a good while, especially if your drive is heavily fragmented.
Take your much-neglected sweetie to dinner, and disable the screen saver before you go. If it seems to hang, leave it alone for a while -- it is probably working on a particularly fragmented section of hard drive and while it seems to have locked, it is actually busy. (One way to tell is to look at the disk-activity light on your computer. If there is hard disk activity, the light will be on, at least intermittently.) Premature shutdown of Defrag can zap your whole file structure. Hands off for at least an hour. Go to dinner, come back, and if it's still hung, then and only then shut it down.
Labels: Definition