Question

7. Discuss how defragmentation can improve system performance:

Answer 1

Whenever a new file is written to a disk, due to unavailability of contiguous clusters, the file may not be written. Non-contiguous clusters slow down the process of reading and writing a file. Apart from this, the more distant the non-contiguous clusters are, the more time the system takes to move the read/write head of a hard disk drive. This fragmentation slows down the overall performance of the system.

Disk fragmentation consolidates fragmented files and folders on your system so that each occupies a single space on the disk. With your files stored neatly end to end, without fragmentation, reading and writing to the disk speeds up.