What is Fragmentation?

Fragmentation is the revolutionary solution that turned your limited hard disk into the spacious hangar of information it is. As information is constantly written and erased from the disk, new files to be stored on the disk are fragmented (i.e. split up) to fit into previously vacated locations on the disk, allowing full access to the entire storage area on the disk.

The novelty of this was the computer's ability to fragment files for storage, and regroup stored files for reading, while you, the user, are not aware of this tremendous feat at all. As a matter of fact, the user is normally unaware of the fragmentation process.

The problem emerges indirectly once the level of the fragmentation negatively affects the performance of the computer.