What is Fragmentation ?
Definition of Fragmentation: – Fragmentation is a situation in the operating system (OS) of a computer in which data is broken into many smaller pieces and stored in different places, instead of being stored at one place on a storage device such as a hard disk drive. But in most cases, some free space is left in the memory of the storage device, whose size is so small that no data can be stored on these free spaces. Due to which the memory space is not used properly and the capacity or performance of the system is poor.
If in simple words, Fragmentation is such an unwanted problem due to which some such small free space is left in the memory, which cannot be used to store the data of any file.
The data of different types of files is saved, modified and deleted on the hard disk continuously by the user of the operating system or OS, so it is very common to have disk fragmentation problem in all computers.
Type of Fragmentation :- There are mainly three types of Fragmentation :-
External fragmentation: - This is a situation in which the data cannot be stored in the disk even though there is sufficient space available to store the data in the hard disk because all the free space of the disk is non-contiguous ( non-contiguous). Non-contiguous means that the free space left in the disk's memory is divided into smaller blocks and is scattered in such a way that it is not possible to store data in any way in those small blocks. Techniques like segmentation and paging are used to deal with the problem of external fragmentation.
Internal fragmentation: - This problem arises when the hard disk of the computer is divided into blocks of fixed size because when such data is stored in these fixed blocks whose size is the size of the data. is greater than , then the remaining free space in the disk's block is wasted unnecessarily. The problem of internal fragmentation can be fixed by using technology like dynamic partition.
Data Fragmentation :- If an attempt is made to store any new data in the empty block of a hard disk in which a problem like External Fragmentation has already arisen, then the situation of Data Fragmentation arises. In data fermentation, a collection of data in a computer's storage device is broken up into pieces and spread across the hard disk in such a way that all the different pieces of data are separated from each other on the disk.
Advantages of Fragmentation :-
Due to fermentation, the speed of storing data in the hard disk is often faster.
This can be taken advantage of by reducing the problems caused by fermentation by using a variety of techniques.
Disadvantages of Fragmentation :-
A huge part of its hard disk is completely wasted because we are not able to make any use of it.
It takes a lot of time to get and use the information stored in the hard disk.
The execution of a program or instructions to be performed by the user takes a long time, which slows down the speed of the entire computer system.
How to Avoid Fragmentation Problem in Storage Device :- Techniques like segmentation, paging and dynamic partition are used to deal with the problem of fragmentation arising in hard disk.
Apart from this, operating systems such as Windows also have the facility of defragmentation, using which the user can collect the data scattered in the storage device and free the small memory blocks lying idle. . The user should defragment his computer's storage device from time to time, this speeds up all the processes of the computer and also frees up a lot of space to store data in the hard disk.
Summery of fragmentation:- In this article we have tried to explain fragmentation in memory devices in simple Hindi language. Hope you liked this article on fragmentation in Hindi. If you want to give any suggestion related to this article written on fragmentation, then definitely tell us by writing in the comment box below so that we can make necessary changes in our article to make it more useful.