Reply #3: You may be overdefining fragmentation [View All]

[Spinzonner]

Technically it just refers to different parts of a file being non-contiguous so that the drive head must move over different parts of the drive to retrieve all the parts.

What you are referring to has to do with making free space contiguous also and might be called compressing the drive space. (Not to be confused with compressing files like ZIP's)

While there is some overall benefit to that, especially for adding new files of non-trivial size, one has to consider the expense in time and wear and tear to, in effect, defragment areas that are not yet in use.