We all know that defragging your hard drive is considered an essential task for system health in Windows. So just what is disk fragmentation, and what causes it?

From what I can tell disk fragmentation originated in the days of those really small hard drives we all used to use. I can remember my first hard drive was a whopping 40 megabytes large! That equates to only 28 1.44 megabyte floppy disks.

Back then a strategy was developed to make writing larger files to disk on those small drives easier. What happens is that as small files are deleted off of the drive, they leave "holes" of free space between regions of the drive that are in use.

There may not always be a large enough empty hole to write some large files to on those small drives, so Microsoft in all their wisdom decided to have the files written in non-contiguous pieces in each of the small holes left over by deleted files. This builds up over time, and many files get their parts scattered over the file system in small pieces here and there, and this is called disk fragmentation.

At the time, it was a good attempt at solving the space shortage problem, but that day is now past, with new massive hard rives obviating the problem.

As files get periodically deleted, and new ones are written to disk, the amount of fragmentation goes up drastically, because they always start at the front of the drive, and write to any small spaces available, working their way up the drive structure as they go.

This disk fragmentation leads to slower computer performance, as the hard drive has to seek in many disparate portions of the drive to read an entire file in, causing a lot of "disk thrash" of the read write heads trying to gather together all of the small pieces, and load them as one file.

This strategy has carried over to the current day of very large hard drives, and it really is not necessary anymore. When you have a hard drive on the order of over 100 gigabytes large, there really is no reason to fragment files. There should always be large enough empty spaces to accommodate writing even the largest files to disk all in one piece on today's drives.

Linux computers do exactly that. There is very little if any disk fragmentation present on a Linux system, because they do not write a file into holes smaller than it will fit in. Instead the system seeks out a large enough "hole" for the file to fit into, and writes it there. The system saves the small holes for files small enough to fit in them.

Microsoft on the other hand seeks the very first bit of available free space, and begins writing a file into it regardless of whether or not it will fit, then continues writing the file in the next closest available free space, and so on until the entire file is written to disk, but in small pieces distributed across the drive.

There really is no excuse for hard drive fragmentation in this day of extra large hard drives, and continued use of the file writing system that foments fragmentation is murdering your hard drive with all of the extra head thrashing caused by fragmented files, and frequent defragging runs, not to mention virus scans.

Linux really is the way to go is you want your hard drive to last, and would like to actually use your computer instead of sitting around waiting on it to defragment it's file structure, or do a virus scan. I've been using Ubuntu Linux now for about a year and a half, and I never use Windows anymore, even 'though it is still on my machine.

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