What exactly does defragmneting a hard drive do to it?
110967
Simply, when you install and delete programs and files, you create blank spaces in the hard drive.  Programs that are installed are placed in available spaces, not contiguously. which can cause the hard drive to work harder, and slower.\n\nDefragmenting the hard drive takes all your files and programs and puts them back together so the hard drive can work faster and more efficiently.\n\nYou can run a defrag every couple of months, or specifically when you want to install or have just deleted a big program.
530974
Imagine your PC's hard drive is much like a 33 rpm record on a turn-table. Instead of grooves that create music, the PC drive contains invisible chunks of information, read by a "needle" that actually is like a wand, that rests just above the disc (about a human hair's width). This disc, spinning at hundreds of RPM's a minute, is working that wand back and forth, finding those chunks of information and putting them in order.\n\nNow, defragging is the task of organizing those chunks into neat tracks and sectors on the hard drive, making it less an effort for the "wand" or read/write head to find the information on the PC hard drive.  Defragging should be done every 2 weeks or so, to help speed the PC up.
384632
when you defrag your disk all it does is place scattered info on your computer into a more easily accessible format.. in other words.. if you use your computer a lot.. you will have info spread all over your disk.. this happens in general usage.. if you delete a lot of stuff it makes the info more spread out.. the defrag places it all in a row and helps your computer fun faster and more efficiently.. Hope this helps.. :) It is good to defrag once every few weeks if you are on your computer a lot..
64439
Wasted space, optimization, fragmented, defragmentation and slack. Terms that not too long ago had little or no meaningful relationship to computers, let alone hard drives, or any type of drive for that matter. File fragmentation, one of the vagaries of the FAT file system, has garnered considerably more attention in recent years with the advent of hard drive sizes above 1 GB in size. When hard drives were in the range of 40MB to 1GB, no one had a clue that their drives had wasted space. As a matter of fact, most were enthralled at the release of a 1GB hard drive. It wasn't until the mid-1990s, when hard drives began climbing above 2GB, did we realize that there was something wrong, yet we had no idea just what it was. Hard drives were not being divided into multiple partitions at that time, and after a period of continued use, users began noticing that large amounts disk space seemed to literally disappear. While on smaller drives, those below 1GB, this was barely noticeable, but on larger drives approaching 2GB, this amounted to hundreds of megabytes. As file fragmentation was more fully understood, and defragmentation tools began to develop, users finally understood the "why" behind the disappearing disk space. Shortly after the release of the FAT32 file system, the issue of fragmentation became less critical. Now, however, as hard drive sizes climb above the 80GB range, we begin revisiting the old terms such as wasted space, optimization, fragmented, defragmentation, and add a new one, "slack". As long as hard drives remained below the 30GB range, FAT 32 tended to keep everything cleaned up, but as we passed the 40 GB mark, even FAT 32 has its problems controlling slack.\n\nObviously this missing drive space isn't really gone, unless we're talking about damaged or lost clusters, at which point this missing drive space is actually unusable portions of the hard drive that need to be recovered with the appropriate disk utility. However, we're not discussing that aspect of missing drive space, we're discussing slack. This slack space is simply space wasted as a result of the cluster system that FAT file system uses. A cluster is the minimum amount of space that can be assigned to a file, and no file can use merely a part or piece of a cluster and a separate file use the remainder under the FAT file system. Essentially, when a file is assigned to a cluster, even if it were merely a single byte of data, the space assigned would rounded to an integer multiple equal to the cluster size itself. If you add to that file, gradually the entire cluster would be used until you reach the maximum size of that cluster. As soon as the file becomes larger than the capacity of that single cluster, even by a single byte, the additional byte is then allocated to another cluster, and the file's space usage will double, even though the file only increased in size by one byte.
256983
Ok, well it sounds like to me that there can be one of many things going on here. Here is a small checklist to go through before defragmenting your hardrive\n\n Check list:\n1. Make sure you have atleast 5 Gigabytes left on your hardrive so the defragment process has some physical memory to work with.\n\n2. Its good to run a spyware scan, ad-ware scan, and virus scan befor using the defragment program. \nGoogle the following programs:\n\nSpybot - Search and Destroy  (for spyware)\nAd-aware by lavasoft (For adware)\n(recommended) Norton Anti-virus\n\n3. Analize the disk, then defragment but make sure that no other non-system processes are running in the background that could lag your computer.\n\n I hope this was of help, if not then just E-mail me at void_3e01@yahoo.com and I will go further into detail on what you can do.
511966
Because some files have been selected to be moved to another part of the hard drive. If you are going to run defrag run it completely - it can take a while. Should not have to run this but rarely on new computers. Run scandisk.
615219
It depends.  If you move a lot of files around, install and uninstall things a lot and if your hard drive is small (40 Gbs or less) you will need to defrag more often.  Large drives don't really need it too often.  The purpose is to put the "fragments" of your files and programs back into a continuous "string" thereby loading a bit quicker.  It is not a magic bullet to gain any perceived speed.  The PC just runs more efficiently.  Windows XP will give you a recommendation when you run the defrag program.  I guess it never hurts, but remember, hard drives have a lifespan, and no need to make the drive work harder than it has to.
74588
There is a program running that is taking up resources to cause this.  Try a virus scan and spyware scan.  If you don't have antivirus or spyware removal tools try the links below.  You may also want to try to defragment your hard drive.
99284
Try defraging the hard drive. Click on start-click programs-scroll to accessories,system tools then click on disk defragmenter. While in the program click on analyze it will probably tell you it doesn't need defraging but defrag it anyway.
19022
Generally it is not worth the hassle, as the Linux filesystems i.e. ext2fs/reiserfs etc do not get affected in the same way as FAT/FAT32 or NTFS filesystems.\nThere is a small amount of fragmentation but it is very small, around 5% and when it occurs it does not affect system performance to the extent as in FAT/NTFS filesystems.\nThere are a few utilites for linux if you want to see just how fragmented the linux filesystem actually is (see links below).\nLinux has a much better organising of files hence why defragging is not that much of an issue.\nDefragging in linux may be beneficial if you are running low on disk space.\n\nCheers!
273339
Defragmentation isn't done so much for adding space, but for speeding up your computer and making it last longer. If you don't run any programs or operating systems from your second drive you probably only need to defragment it occasionally, but you should defragment your primary one fairly often. \n\nIt could be said that over-defragmenting can hurt your computer by making the hard drive spin more while you defragment, which could shorten its life--but keep in mind; hard drives are built to spin, any damage done would be fairly minimal. Also, if the drive needs it, any damage done by defragmenting will quickly be made up for, since the hard drive won't have to spin as much to find the pieces of files after it is defragmented.\n\nAs for files getting rearranged; I have never heard of this and I question that that is the reason masako_akira1980's files are moved. If it is, it is probably due to a faulty defragmenter program and/or the operating system needs to be reinstalled.
412969
You probably have programs running in the background that are preventing it from working properly. For Windows, restart into Safe Mode and try running Disk Defragmenter there.
284434
No, it will only lower your available disk space. If you have say a 20 byte file, on a 4 sector cluster, it will take like 2048 bytes of disk space. If you raise it up to 8 sector clusters, the same file will take up 4096 bytes.\n\nI suppose it MIGHT increase performance slightly on systems that have been running a very long time and have never been defragged because the file chunks are larger and slightly less likely to frag, but I would not be willing to lose all the disk space.
997348
Are you running other programs while you defrag?  If you haven't done it for a long long time, it can take up to a day or so...but you're right. That does sound awfully slow.\n\nI'd try freeing up as much space on your hard drive as you can, deleting temporary files and the like, then restarting and running the degrag program by itself.\n\nOh, and also, sometimes anti-virus programs running in the background can screw with it. Good luck.
298570
Hardrive data is stored as small bumps and lack of bumps refered to as binary (yes/no one/zero).  When you erase those bumps by deleting a file, the other bumps don't go away, but they can move when you defrag a hard drive.  It's like putting a hole in a fence when you delete a file and when you defrag it's like moving the remaining fence inward to fill in where the hole is.
38351
go to Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools> Disk Defragment
1100355
Defragment hard drive, add more memory, run virus scanner and spyware scanner. To begin with...