It’s a problem that only applies to spinning hard drives - SSDs are fast enough that they can pull your data out wherever it’s written, and defragging an SSD, although possible, only adds to the problem of premature wear.
#Defragmentation for mac zip#
If the new data is larger than the hole left by the deletion, it will write part of it there and part in the next bit of free space, leaving a note as to where the rest of the data is - this way, your drive becomes fragmented.ĭefragmentation, or defragging, is the art of piecing all the data together so it lays in nice even strips without your hard drive’s seeker head having to zip all over the drive platters searching for the next bit.
But once you’ve deleted a bit, your computer will try to use up that freshly vacated space before it writes to untouched areas of the disc. When the drive is new, data can be written sequentially. As drives have got bigger, computers have got faster, and operating systems have become more sophisticated, it has become something that runs in the background while you’re using your PC, but even this can require a helping hand from time to time, whether it’s an internal or external hard drive.įragmentation is something that happens to data on a hard drive that’s regularly used. It used to be a dreadfully slow process that you’d only attempt if something had gone dreadfully wrong with your hard drive, and even on the smallest drives you’d need to leave it overnight.
Defragmenting, and therefore using the best defragmenter software, is a tricky one.