Additional Links

PC Webopaedia: Fragmentation  With hard drives becoming larger and larger about every six months (a 5GB hard drive is now affordable for many consumers, and 10GB drives are on the way), issues of disk fragmentation and partitioning become more important to understand. A fragmented disk can slow down your system, and some hard drives won't operate efficiently unless they are correctly partitioned. To begin learning why you should care about these issues, read the PC Webopaedia's discussion of fragmentation. Then follow the links to learn more.

PC Guide: Hard Disk Logical Structures and File Systems   Did you know that there is a relationship between the file allocation table and the maximum usable size of a hard drive volume? Have you noticed that your several-gigabyte hard drive doesn't seem to hold as much data as you thought it would? To learn the answers to these questions, read PC Guide's detailed discussion of partitioning, partition sizes, and drive lettering. You'll also want to read about disk partitioning and formatting programs.