If you’ve ever been told to defragment your computer’s hard drive, then you may have been momentarily confused. What does ‘defragmenting’ your hard drive actually mean? Today, we’re going to teach you what defragmenting your hard drive does, and why it is so important for you to perform a defragmentation scan regularly.
Think of your hard drive like a swimming pool. The toys in that swimming pool are any files that you add to your hard drive. Large files like HD videos and programs are big, bulky toys, while smaller files like text documents are tiny rubber duckies. In order for your computer to find the files it needs, it needs to swim around this pool gathering files.
At first, the water current bunches all of these files in the center of the pool, making it easier for the user to swim out and access them. When the pool toys are bunched at the center of the pool, your computer is running fast and can easily access everything it needs.
As you add more toys to your pool, your computer may not necessarily care about where each file goes. It just throws each toy into the water. Over time, adding new programs – and the natural current of the pool itself – cause your files to spread out, which means that you have to swim extra hard to reach everything you need.
If you open up a program, for example, then you may need to access two different files that have floated across the pool from one another. This increases access times and slows down your computer.
When you defragment your computer, it moves all of these files closer to the center of the pool. For a brief period of time, your computer will be running at a fast pace because all of the files can easily be accessed, but eventually, the files will float apart once more. This means that you have to regularly scan your computer in order to experience the full benefits of defragmentation.
If you followed my metaphor, you should have a better idea of how hard drive defragmentation works. Now, the next step is to get a hard drive defragmenter for your own computer. Click on the button below to download your free scan of PC Cleaner Pro 2012, which includes a special disk defragmenting tool.