This week's topic was about "Operating Systems and Utility Programs". It was a very interesting one for me, as I as Mac user, got to know that I am even strongly discouraged to conduct disk defragmentation, as I did before with my PCs that used the Windows OS. However, disk defragmentation is a very helpful and even necessary activity every person using a Windows OS should conduct, in order to optimize the speed and utilization of the computer and its disk.
Disk Defragmentation
Every time, when we store anything - a program, a file, or whatever - on a Windows PC, or every time when we re-arrange something and put a file into another folder, programs being uninstalled, information is being added or deleted, gaps form on the disk. Files may even be split/fragmented to fit on the disk. Though the computer still knows, that the data is on the disk, it takes the PC a lot more time and power to find the separated parts of a file and put it together again to be able to display it to the user, who asked for that file. The question now is: what does a disk defragmentation program do? Here is a little example:
Just imagine a book shelf in your room. You put some books on it, next to each other, so that there are no gaps. Then, after a while, you remove a few (let's say 3) very small books from this shelf. These books are creating 3 small gaps in your row of books in your shelf. So, if you bought a new book, and you would like to put it into your bookshelf, and you see that it is too big to fit into the small 3 gaps that were created in your book shelf when you removed the other 3 smaller books, what do you do?
You need to re-arrange the books in the shelf, so that only one large gap remains, in which you can put your larger book. So you do not have to split your larger book into smaller parts, to fit it into your shelf, but you can just put it into the shelf as one whole book.
If you now substitute "book" with "file" and "book shelf" with "disk", you should see how disk defragmentation works. All in all, it makes you use your computer's disk more efficiently, what saves you and your PC time and power.
Now, as a Mac user, you are strongly discouraged to use any kind of disk fragmentation: Macintosh itself uses a system to optimize disk usage, so any kind of manual defragmentation activity would counter Apple's optimization efforts, which would definitely not result in better performance after the defragmentation.
So Apple users: keep your hands off of disk defragmentation programs!
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