Your hard drive is a physical piece of hardware very much like a record player (for those of us old enough to remember what those are). The plates of the hard drive spin and the information is recorded onto or retrieved from the disk by electronic heads. I stress again here we are talking about physical data.

When you open a file it is retrieved from the hard drive and placed into RAM (Random Access Memory) so that the operating system can act on it. You do whatever it is you are doing and the data of that file is changed and usually increased in size. The system then tries to put the data back onto the hard drive in the same place it retrieved it from. Sometimes though it can only place a portion of the data back in the spot where it came from and the new extra data has to be stored on a different part of the disk. This happens quite often in fact.

The next time you want to work with that file the disk has to spin to the first spot and get the first portion of the data and then spin to the second spot and get the second portion of the data. Obviously it would be faster if it could just get all the data from the same area.

I have just given you an example using one file. Most of the time when you open a program or perform a function on your computer you are affecting hundreds if not thousands of files. I hope you are beginning to see how this can be a serious problem. Over time disk fragmentation can seriously slow down your computer.

Fortunately, this problem is fairly easy to fix and to keep under control. There are several very good commercial products available for Hard Drive Defragmentation and I have no doubt they are worth the asking price. The recommendation that I make to the customers of my computer repair business is to download Smart Defrag from iobit.com. I have used it many times and hundreds of my customers have told me how satisfied they are with this utility. I am in no way affiliated with Smart Defrag or iobit.com I simply recommend it because I have found it to be fast and reliable.