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You may be aware
that it is important to defragment your hard disk, but do
you know why?.
Have you
ever watched what happens when you get new tires on your car?
After they mount the tire and inflate it, they'll spin the
tire and add weights to balance it. A wheel that is not balanced
will not spin in a perfect circle--the unbalanced weight will
vibrate the wheel causing faster tire wear and possibly damage
to your wheel bearings.
Anything
that spins, especially if it spins at high speeds, needs to
be perfectly balanced. This applies to your hard disk also.
A hard
disk spins at a VERY high speed, over 7200 rpm! That is is
why it is important to have the files as equally spaced around
the disk as possible. The best possible situation is to always
keep hard disk 100% full. That way you'll know the files are
distributed equally across the surface of the disk and there
will be no vibrations resulting from an unbalanced disk. However,
some people prefer to have some free space on their hard disks,
and that means they must take steps to ensure the files are
distributed equally.
Defragmenting
is the solution to this problem.
When a
computer saves files it breaks them into smaller pieces and
stores those pieces in random locations on the hard disk.
Microsoft Windows was designed this way because it was thought
that by scattering the files in pieces all over the hard disk,
the hard disk would stay balanced. However, it didn't work
out all that well--and over time the pieces of files tend
to accumulate on one side more than the other and the disk
begins to get out of balance. As the disk starts vibrating
the smaller pieces of files will tend to drift toward the
heavier side of the disk resulting in greater vibrations and
more files moving to the heavy side--with the resulting increasing
vibrations eventually leading to failure of your hard disk's
bearings.
What defragmenting
does is to collect all the pieces and assemble them back into
the original file. It then starts saving them in the center
of the hard drive, laying the files down in concentric circles
moving outward from the center of the disk. This results in
a fairly well balanced distribution of the files, with the
files located near the center of gravity of the disk. This
will eliminate vibrations and saves considerable wear on your
hard disk's bearings that results from the slight wobble coming
from an unbalanced disk.
Another
advatange of of defragmenting is that it speeds up the transfer
of data from your ard drive to your computer's memory. When
a file is fragmented into small pieces, the harddisk is spinning
so fast that sometimes a piece of file whizes by before the
data head can read it. When this happens the disk must stop
spinning, reverse direction and back up until the data head
can read the file fragment that was missed. Then the disk
can start spinning forward again. Obviously this takes time
and results in it taking a greater amount of time to read
all the data from the disk.
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