What is fragmentation?How does it affect computers performance?
Answers
Disk fragmentation occurs when files are broken into hundreds or even thousands of pieces and scattered across your hard drive. This occurs naturally whenever files get created, deleted, or extended and even when the operating system is first installed. Even if you have plenty of free space, Windows still fragments files and before you know it, your once fast system starts to slow down. Microsoft recognizes fragmentation as a problem and recommends defragmenting your drives regularly.
File fragmentation causes a huge degradation in system performance, and over time can bring your system to a near crawl. Fragmentation causes your computer to use excessive resources (memory and CPU time) to complete tasks related to reading and writing files. This unnecessarily increases the work your computer must do to support the applications you are running. In cases of severe fragmentation, some applications may not run at all. Backup is one of the few operations that may actually read an entire disk. As disks grow in size, the time taken by the system to perform a full backup increases proportionally.
Fragmentation can cause applications to launch more slowly, file access to take longer, system boot/shutdown to slow, slow system hibernation/resume from hibernation, causes videos to drop frames and music to skip.
Fragmentation slows down your virtual environments as the virtual hard drive on the Windows host becomes fragmented and the Windows guest file system fragments.
File fragmentation causes a huge degradation in system performance, and over time can bring your system to a near crawl. Fragmentation causes your computer to use excessive resources (memory and CPU time) to complete tasks related to reading and writing files. This unnecessarily increases the work your computer must do to support the applications you are running. In cases of severe fragmentation, some applications may not run at all. Backup is one of the few operations that may actually read an entire disk. As disks grow in size, the time taken by the system to perform a full backup increases proportionally. Fragmentation can cause applications to launch more slowly, file access to take longer, system boot/shut down to slow, slows down hibernation/resume from hibernation, causes videos to drop frames and music to skip. Fragmentation slows down your virtual environments as the virtual hard drive on the Windows host becomes fragmented and the Windows guest file system fragments