Defragmentation

In the maintenance of file systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation. It does this by physically organizing the contents of the mass storage device used to store files into the smallest number of contiguous regions (fragments). It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Some defragmentation utilities try to keep smaller files within a single directory together, as they are often accessed in sequence.

Defragmentation is advantageous and relevant to file systems on electromechanical disk drives. The movement of the hard drive's read/write heads over different areas of the disk when accessing fragmented files is slower, compared to accessing the entire contents of a non-fragmented file sequentially without moving the read/write heads to seek other fragments.

Fragmentation occurs when the file system cannot or will not allocate enough contiguous space to store a complete file as a unit, but instead puts parts of it in gaps between existing files (usually those gaps exist because they formerly held a file that the file system has subsequently deleted or because the file system allocated excess space for the file in the first place). Files that are often appended to (as with log files) as well as the frequent adding and deleting of files (as with emails and web browser cache), larger files (as with videos) and greater numbers of files contribute to fragmentation and consequent performance loss. Defragmentation attempts to alleviate these problems.

Consider the following scenario, as shown by the image on the right:

An otherwise blank disk has five files, A through E, each using 10 blocks of space (for this section, a block is an allocation unit of the filesystem; the block size is set when the disk is formatted and can be any size supported by the filesystem). On a blank disk, all of these files would be allocated one after the other (see example 1 in the image). If file B were to be deleted, there would be two options: mark the space for file B as empty to be used again later, or move all the files after B so that the empty space is at the end. Since moving the files could be time consuming if there were many files which need to be moved, usually the empty space is simply left there, marked in a table as available for new files (see example 2 in the image). When a new file, F, is allocated requiring 6 blocks of space, it could be placed into the first 6 blocks of the space that formerly held file B, and the 4 blocks following it will remain available (see example 3 in the image). If another new file, G, is added and needs only 4 blocks, it could then occupy the space after F and before C (example 4 in the image). However, if file F needs to be expanded, there are three options, since the space immediately following it is no longer available:

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