Why is ther not a program that automatically keeps your hd from "fragmenting" in the first place? In my uninformed opinion (Iknow nothing about why a hd files get fragmented in the first place) think it would be more effecient if the way the pc puts struff on the hard drive would be in some kind of order, group similar files together then there would be less need to defragement. It seems there is no ryme or reason behind whear a file gets written onto the hard drive.
would it be more effecient and make more sense for files to be grouped together when there put on the hard drive?
Realize I'm an individual that still can't figure out how to put windows on it's own partition and have no clue as to the difference between a fat file or the other type.
just a thought.

It's not such an easy task to prevent harddisk fragmentation altogether.

When data is initially written to the disk, it is written as one long sector. But over time, files are moved and deleted from the harddisk, which leaves "holes" in the data. When more data is written to the disk, the system attempts to fill in these holes. Hence, fragmentation occurs.

The easiest way to help gain back the speed you loose on your HDD from fragmentation is to defrag... set it so it runs at night when you're not using the computer. That's what I do and it works beautifully.

Fragmentation is a way of life on hard disks, there's really no logical way to avoid it once you understand how data is physically written to the disk. One way would be to resort the data every time a file is modified or deleted, but that would slow things down considerably. Not to mention every time you appended a byte you would need to shuffle stuff around. Then again you could leave a buffer around each file, but if it outgrew the buffer you would still fragment, and not to mention when you fill up the drive with data and buffers data would have to be split up to fit in the buffer space.

A good enough solution is just to defrag nightly

If one reads carefully, Windows actually trys to defrag the HDD when not in use all by its self *pets windows* , however, fragmentation occurs anyway because it only does this when the disk is idle, and not in use *kicks Windows*. Well, you disk is always used, whether you to it to or not. So, it becomes the task of the end user to run HDD defragmentation tools to speed things up. The built in Defragmentation tool is the first step when you defrag the drive. This puts everything in in a nice and neat order. Then one needs to run a third party defragmentor that optimizes the HDD by putting the most frequently used files at the begining of the HDD. IE Norton's Speed Disk. and System Mechanic's Disk Optimizor. This task should be perform usually at the end of every month, but no later than once every quarter. Hope that helps

Quote: Originally Posted by vmspionage Fragmentation is a way of life on hard disks, there's really no logical way to avoid it once you understand how data is physically written to the disk. One way would be to resort the data every time a file is modified or deleted, but that would slow things down considerably. Not to mention every time you appended a byte you would need to shuffle stuff around. Then again you could leave a buffer around each file, but if it outgrew the buffer you would still fragment, and not to mention when you fill up the drive with data and buffers data would have to be split up to fit in the buffer space. A good enough solution is just to defrag nightly

So, once solid state drives become the norm, will we still get fragmentation?

yeah, still

yeah, still have it. it will never go away.