Maintaining Your Drive; Defragmenting And Optimizing A Hard Drive - Acomdata External HARD DRIVE USB 2.0 User Manual

Maintaining Your Drive

A hard drive is a very sophisticated and sensitive device that
requires proper care and maintenance to ensure the longest
possible life, reliable operation and—most importantly—
the integrity of your stored data.
Defragmenting and Optimizing a Hard Drive
A hard drive stores data on disks called platters. Each platter
surface is divided into concentric tracks. Each track is divided
into sectors. A group of sectors, called a cluster, or allocation
unit, is the smallest unit of data storage space.
When data is saved to a new hard drive, it is written to
disk contiguously, one cluster after another. As old files
are erased, clusters that were previously occupied become
available for new data. However, there may not be enough
space for the drive to write a new file in a contiguous set
of clusters. The drive uses the clusters it can; if more are
needed it searches for empty clusters in other locations on
the disk(s). The result is a fragmented file.
Over time, as old files are erased and new files are writ-
ten, the data becomes increasingly fragmented. The more
fragmented a disk becomes, the longer it takes to read