File fragmentation in windows
File fragmentation, refers to file is divided and stored into fragment which results in unused disk space loss. This happens in windows when,
suppose you are typing a document in word before saving it. While your typing, the windows allocate the necessary disk space to store that file with additional space called padding to save further. Mean while if you are installing any software or creating any temperory files, those temperory files will get stored in these padded areas before you saving your word document. The remaining word files are stored along with temperory files stored in padded areas.
Once if those temperory files are deleted, those space becomes empty, it can’t be used by anyother files, since the stored word file is now fragmented.
To overcome this fragmentaion, microsoft has introduced defragmentor to avoid file fragmentation, but it occupied more disk space and CPU resources till windows XP.
With the increase in disk space, people are now switiching to third party disk fragmentors.
More improvement in done on defragmentor to support windows 7 and vista. It avoid fragmentaion by
i)finding large chunk of free space.
ii)padding at end of file.
By using defragmentor, you can utilize your hard disk in a effective way!
