If you have plenty of hard-drive space, do you need to defragment? — Georgia Clark
Georgia’s referring to the process of rearranging the data on your computer’s hard drive so it is more efficiently stored and accessed.
 |
Join the Discussion |
 |
Post a Comment |
A typical hard drive is made up of several hard discs called platters, which store information. Every time you use your hard drive, you are reading, writing and erasing data. Traditionally, as the drive is accessed, it may write data to different "sectors" on the platter. Over time, the data is scattered all over the disc, and it ultimately takes more time to access certain data.
What defragmenting does is moves the data into the closest possible areas of the platter, making it faster for the mechanical drive to access the information.
In theory, it speeds up the computer’s overall performance, and I have seen noticeable speed increases. But usually that’s only when the disc has not been defragmented in a long time.
Usually, if you have a lot of free hard-drive space — say more than 50 percent — it’s not really necessary to defrag the drive because there’s still plenty of space to write large files, as opposed to breaking up the files before writing them to the disc.
Windows comes with a free defrag tool. With it, you can analyze the hard drive to see how much of it is fragmented. If more than 10 or 15 percent of it is fragmented, run the program.
You can access it one of two ways: Go to the Start menu, then click on All Programs, the Accessories folder, the System Tools folder, then on the Disk Deframenter program. Clicking on "analyze" can tell you how much of the drive is fragmented. You can also access the tool by right-clicking on My Computer, then Properties, clicking on the Tools tab, then the Defragment button.
If you’re a Mac user, you may notice that there is no defragmenting utility. That’s because later versions of the OS X operating system and the file system it uses intelligently know to save files to larger areas of the hard drive instead of fragmenting the data before writing it.
There is Mac utility software on the market from third parties that claim to defrag hard drives, but I’ve never used them. But many posts on Apple forums have stated they really don’t help, so be aware that they may not be necessary.
If you have a question for Vince, email him at ohmytech@sltrib.com, and he’ll try to answer it for his column in The Salt Lake Tribune or its website.
Copyright 2012 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
