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Disk Defragmenter?


RAINMAKA

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It rearranges files that are commonly used in conjunction or for the same purpose and places them together on the hardrive, close to each other. This way when you are using something that needs those 2 files they are right by each other so it takes less time to search the hardrive for them. Somebody else could probably give you a more technical definition.

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actually the rearranging of files is only done for some system files. the far more important function of defragmentation is to put the fragments of files together. say you have a fresh install. you have a couple of files of say 2, 4, 5 and 3 MB on your drive, that are located at different locations on the drive. thats 14 MB. if you delete these files, these 14 MB total get tagged as free in the FAT. (file allocation table, the index of the drive, so to speak) now you create or download or copy a 16 MB file. what happens is that the OS fills all the free space on the drive, using the 4 spots making up the 14 MB and then hangs the rest of the file, the 2 MB that's left, onto the end of the used space. now this one file, when read, requires the drive to go to 5 seperate areas to read it, making the process slower. this example is of course exaggerated. most of the bits freed up are a lot smaller, and files can end up being chopped into dozens of pieces or more. imagine this going on for some time, with the swapfile also being spread from hell to breakfast, and you begin to see the problem. defragmenting the drive means that the os goes and sees how big file x is. it now moves files y and z to make enough room to write file x in one fell swoop. and  the same for every other file. like a big jigsaw puzzle. this allows files to be read faster, since there are no seek times during the read process, only at the beginning of it.

hope this helps. and in case you didn't want to know, the info is now in your head, so you're stuck with it. enjoy.

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Yeah, you can set up three defragment methods.

Primary Defragmentation Job Properties

Secondary Defragmentation Job Properties

I-FAAST Defragmentation Job Properties

I have them set up to run on a schedule, and my drives stay in perfect order. It runs during games and all. Slow down isn't noticable too much at all.

Enabling I/O Smart will stop the defrag or cause it to run on very low computer usage.

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