"George H. Yankey" <jeffco13 at bellsouth.net> wrote: > I have installed then deleted several small programs . I have also > created, saved then deleted many documents. Do I need to be > concerned about fragmenting my hard drive? If so what do I do about > it?
You can see file fragmentation and disk fragmentation graphically in Drive 10, TechTool and Nortons. There is file fragmentation, where pieces of files are scattered and must be assembled to work everytime they are used. This can slow the computer down. Files are quickly defragged, put back together, by Drive 10. Then there is disk fragmentation, where files and pieces of files are scattered over the disk leaving no large blank areas. If you have a big disk and the files are so few that a lot of the disk is blank, there is no need to pack the files together and make a big blank space. If your disk is full of files and little blank areas, so that there is no large blank area, and if at the same time you want to install an upgrade to the OS for instance, I think it is good to defrag the disk and make a large blank space where the new stuff can install without becoming fragmented. However, defragging a disk, especially a Unix OS disk which has so many system files, can take a long time. I have large disks with partitions that have plenty of capacity left. I defrag their files almost weekly because it is quick. But I don't have the need or the time to defrag the partitions. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be August 26. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
