Defragmenting Your Hard Disk
Windows 8 comes with a utility called Defragment and Optimize Drives that’s an essential tool for tuning your hard disk. The job of Defragment and Optimize Drives is to rid your hard disk of file fragmentation.
File fragmentation is one of those terms that sounds scarier than it actually is. It simply means that a file is stored on your hard disk in scattered, noncontiguous bits. This is a performance drag because it means that when Windows 8 tries to open such a file, it must make several stops to collect the various pieces. If a lot of files are fragmented, it can slow even the fastest hard disk to a crawl.
Why doesn’t Windows 8 just store files contiguously? Recall that Windows 8 stores files on disk in clusters, ...
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