There are many, many contributing factors when it comes to the health of (or lack of) your pc's hard drive. One of the most common causes of poor computer performance is a problem known as disk fragmentation. People who use their computer quite often and upload/download new files and programs on a regular basis are likely to suffer a bit more from this computer ailment then others. Please keep in mind, however, that no one is immune to this problem.
The trouble with disk fragmentation is that it is a silent attacker. Your disk can be fragmented horribly, and there are no warning windows or pop-up reminders to defrag your disk. In fact, everything can appear quite normal in function on your pc and all of a sudden your speed and performance can slow way down-this can be related to fragmentation.
So, what is disk fragmentation and how can you stop it? When you install a new program or create a new file, rather then all of the information from that file being stored in the same place, it is scattered around in various blocks of free memory. Why, you ask?
When your operating system (such as Windows) is originally loaded onto your pc along with your other programs, it is usually stored in one compacted, continuous block of data. The only exception to this is system files that are required to be placed into specific file locations. As you continue to use your computer, creating new files, modifying them, and deleting them, the data gets somewhat misplaced during the process.
Take Windows for example. When Windows is creating a new file on the disk, it basically looks for free memory in which to place it and drops it into the first available space. Rather then looking for a 'group' of memory that is suited to hold the entire file or folder, Windows takes that file and writes part of the file into one area of the disk and the rest into another. What you end up with, many times, is a single file that is stored in several blocks scattered throughout the disk. In order to keep track of all of this misconstrued data, Windows keeps a record of all the clusters (divisions and sections of the disk) used to store each file.
This saving and allocating free memory is a rapid process that occurs each time you write (save) to the disk. Just because it is created this easily, however, does not mean that it is relocated quite so easily. Whenever you open a file or folder that has been created in this manner, the disk's head (reader), moves across the drive platter from place to place, 'looking' into each area in which the divided up file has been stored and recompiling it for viewing. This is a lot of work if you consider that if the very same file is unfragmented, the disk head moves to the one specific location which contains the file, reads it, and that's it.
