Fragmentation occurs on a hard drive, memory module, or other media when data is not physically written close enough to the disk. These fragmented, individual pieces of data are generally called fragments.
What is disk fragmentation? Disk fragmentation and defragmentation explained.
Defragmentation is the process of defragmenting or uniting fragmented files so that they are physically closer together on the disk or other media. This may allow the disk to access the file more quickly.
Fragments are simply pieces of files that are not next to each other on the drive. That may be a little strange to think about, and it’s not something you would ever notice, but it’s true.
For example, when you create a new Microsoft Word file, you see the entire file in one place, such as on your desktop or in your Documents folder. You can open it, edit it, delete it, rename it, whatever you want. From your perspective, it all happens in one place, but in reality, at least physically on the drive, this is often not the case.
