What is the advantage and disadvantage of defragmentation?

Answer 1

advantages are that more animals such as tapeworm grow more quickly

Answer 2

Traditional hard drives arrange data on metal platters in a circular track similar to a vinyl record. The drive functions best when the data is arranged sequentially.

During the normal use of a computer files are created, change size, and are removed. When this happens small fragments of the files are created throughout the drive. This fragmentation of data is normal, but gradually degrades the speed of the hard drive.

To load a specific file the hard drive must read from many different areas and assemble the file in the system memory from the many small file fragments. Defragmentation is the process of re-organizing the hard drive data including the file fragments into a sequential order. Regular defragmentation will allow a hard drive to load files and programs faster than one which is not defragmented.

Newer solid state drives do not have the same performance loss issues from fragmentation that traditional hard drives do. Solid state drives should not be defragemented as it decreases the life of the drive.

Answer 3

Defragmentation leads to performance improvements, when used with traditional disk drives, when accessing data which was previously scattered across the surface of the media. This is because head movements and cluster seek operations are reduced in numbers, as the scattered data is combined into fewer, larger, chunks. Note that this effect only applies to those drives which use mechanical and moving heads; any solid state drive will not benefit in this manner.

The primary disadvantage of defragmentation are the substantial processing requirements; defragmenting a drive is time and power consuming, and it is generally not advisable to use the disk for any other purpose during this process, as this further slows down the process, and might reduce its effectiveness.

Another significant disadvantage of defragmentation is the inherit risk in the operation. Defragmentation re-organizes data on the disk on a very low level, and any error in the process, caused by power failure, disk failure, or software errors in the defragmentation software itself are potentially unrecoverable and severe.

With the emergence of increasingly fast drives, the growing popularity of sold-state drives, modern file systems (less prone to fragmentation), and clever caching strategies built into modern operating systems, defragmentation is considerably less important and beneficial than it once was, as its disadvantages begin outweighing the benefits.