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All issuesVolume 323, Issue 3IT NewsStorage

Definition: Defragmentation

Analytics Insight, Thursday, February 20th, 2025

Defragmentation is a process used to optimize the performance of a computer's hard drive by reorganizing fragmented data.

Over time, as files are created, deleted, and modified, they can become fragmented, meaning they are stored in noncontiguous clusters on the disk. This fragmentation can slow down the system since the disk drive needs to access multiple locations to retrieve a single file.

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