Hard drive defragmentation is an important process to keep your computer running smoothly. Doing defragmentation of your hard drive is like going for a walk every morning.

You would normally do a defrag on the following situations.
1. You added or deleted a large number of files.
2. Your do not have much disk space.
3. You install new programs or a new version of the Windows operating system.

To understand what computer hard drive defragmentation is, we will need to understand how windows or similar operating system store files on a hard drive. This is usually referred as the file system.

Windows support two types of file systems, namely FAT and NTFS.

FAT.

The first Operating system we had was DOS (Disk Operating system). DOS was using FAT which stands for File Allocation Table and we have three versions of FAT; FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32.

NTFS

Most windows these days, like windows XP, VISTA or windows 7 use NTFS. NTFS is completely different to how data is organised on a Hard disk. NTFS supersedes FAT as a preferred file system because of better management and security which was an issue with FAT.

The problem with NTFS is after using your computer for a few months, chunks of files are stored everywhere on the hard drive. Unless you have a massive hard drive, if windows cannot find enough contiguous space to save a complete file as a unit, it will save part of your file in free gaps with other files. For that matter when you try to access a file, saved on your hard drive, there is always a delay, reading delay. This is what we call fragmentation.
This is why defragmentation is important!

Defragmentation is the process of keeping all the parts of your file in a contiguous space. This increase time on disk read and make you computer run faster.

When should you do a defragmentation?
Every two month is good. What you should also remember is defragmentation is memory intensive, so it’s better to start the defragmentation in the night or when you will not need your for three to four hours, as this is how long it will most probably take for the defragmentation to complete.

To end up, to avoid wasting your money in computer repairs, do not forget to defrag your computer.