Defragmenting Your Hard Drives

Regular hard drive maintenance is something you probably don't think about often. Most people never take the time to properly clean and maintain hard drives, and when the operating system freezes up, they get upset and taking a hammer to it. Generally hard drive defragmentation has been a long time solution for a slow or sluggish computer. If you ask most people how to fix a sluggish computer, most of the time a good defrag is the first recommendation. Disks become fragmented as various files are written and deleted over time. Hard drive fragmentation tends to get worse over time.

When you install programs on a clean hard drive, the allocation units are written to a single, contiguous area. As you remove programs, delete existing files and write new ones, free allocation units are stored all over the hard disk. Over time, small pieces of files become spread all over your hard disk, causing the drive head to have to cover more surface area, resulting in longer read times.

Not only does this slow down the file reading process, it also causes additional unnecessary wear and tear on the hard disks' components, potentially decreasing the overall life of the drive. Fragmentation is unavoidable; however newer hard drives are designed to reduce fragmentation. The simplest way to avoid spreading allocation units all over the disk is to use a high storage capacity hard drive. If a decent amount of hard drive space is left unused, about 30%, then files are more likely to be aligned in proper formats instead of it trying to find free space here and there. Also newer hard drives often have larger buffers which combine file segments before sending the larger file to the operating system.

There are several programs with which to defragment your hard drive, but to keep it simple we will be using Windows Disk Defragmenter. Diskeeper and O&O Defrag are a couple of good "aftermarket" tools you can use (some must be purchased), however the defragmenting tool that comes with windows works just fine.

To start, close all programs and applications you are running. You can check your task manager (Ctrl + Alt + Del) for any programs running in the background you may not need. Next open the start menu, click on Programs, then click Accessories. Click on System Tools, then click Disk Defragmenter. Here you can set it up to run at a scheduled time. I leave my pc on all the time so I have it set to defrag at 1am every Wednesday morning, so I never have to see it or deal with it. If you don't wish to set a scheduled defrag, go ahead and click Defragment now...

Select the hard drive(s) you wish to defrag and click OK, and your done! If you don't want to set it to defrag on a schedule you will want to run it at least once a month.

If you defragment your hard drive regularly you can improve both the performance and durability of your hard drives. If you defragment and your system is still sluggish or has errors, you may have some type of corruption in your file system itself, such as spyware or a virus.

About the author: John Chilton is co-founder of Platypus PC Inc

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