Defrag: Aka “Defragment”. A maintenance task required by hard drives.
Most hard drives have spinning platters, with data stored in different places around that platter. When your computer writes data to your drive, it does so in “blocks” that are ordered sequentially from one side of the drive’s platter to the other. Fragmentation happens when those files get split between blocks that are far away from each other. The hard drive then takes longer to read that file, because the read head has to “visit” multiple spots on the platter. Defragmentation puts those blocks back in sequential order, so your drive head doesn’t have to run around the entire platter to read a single file.
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