Contiguous Files During Defrag
During a system defragmentation, your computer's operating system organizes a hard drive's fragmented files so that they become contiguous. This means that the computer moves all of the file's individual sections so that they are adjacent to one another. This is beneficial because it makes life much easier for your computer and the hard drive. It should be performed regularly.
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Understanding Hard Drive
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A hard disk drive contains concentric stacks of platters. Included on each platter are concentric circles known as tracks. The smallest unit on a hard disk drive is a sector, which is essentially an addressable subset of a track. A sector can hold 12 to 4096 bytes of data. Data files larger than a sector's capacity are broken into pieces and scattered among several sectors, thus making them fragmented.
Understanding Defragmentation
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Imagine you move into a new home and toss all your furniture and equipment -- kitchenware, couches, clothes and pet supplies -- all over the place. If you were to keep it like this, life would become very difficult because any time you need to find something, you would have to search through piles of unorganized items. Likewise, a computer's files are quickly heaped about a hard drive to save time. Defragmentation fixes this by organizing the files.
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Contiguous Files Benefits
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A hard drive with contiguous files functions faster because your computer can more quickly locate and access its directories and files. And because the hard drive has to put in less work when its files are better organized, the hard drive therefore experiences less wear and tear. Furthermore, well-organized files allow anti-virus software suites to more quickly scan your drive for errors.
Scheduling Defragmentations
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Your best bet is to schedule monthly defrags with your operating system. This way, your files will remain contiguous, even if you forget to perform manual defrags. Ideally, you should manually defrag your drive every time you install or download a large collection of files because your computer will just toss the files all over the place.
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