As you write to the HDD it can only store info in the firt available storge area found, and when this is full it will write any subsequent data to the next free part of the HDD. As you store temp files etc... and delete data from various points it is stored at, it means you get gaps in the continuity of the data files. When you then access thse files, the compter is having to access various random areas to retrieve or write data, and this slows the whole process down. When the HDD is defrag'd it moves all the files that can be moved to ares where the data is together for each file. This speeds up the access times and means you have a cleaner disk for further use.
Yes very clear and concise. One thing to add. Defragment should be done every week or once a month depending on how much ya delete. By defragging ya save wear and tear on the moving parts of the hard drive because the head dont have to jump round to find data. Thus the drive last longer. Trust me. I have a seagate barracuda in my comp in my sig. Its 5 yr old 7200 rpm ata and it works fine knock on head...ahh...I mean wood. So defragging will help the comp run better and last longer.
What I do is use system mechanic 6 at a optimin deep defragment. I have 3 drives currently and its down by the time I wake up!:>
O&O Defrag V8.0 Professional. Works wonders. You can set all your drives to defrag at the same time (parallel), or one at a time (sequential). If you have more than one partition, it will defrag that drive in sequential mode, and at the same time defragging the other drives/partitions in parallel/sequential mode. It's worth it, and easy to use. For those of you running Server OSes....get the Server Edition. It defrags the same as Pro, but includes network drives/folders options. Both have settings for boot defrag, pagefile defrag...etc. And, you can set how you much of the system resources are to be used for defragging.
