Whats the difference between Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragment?
Disk Cleanup gets rid of unnessecary files on your harddrive, such as internet termporary files, recycle bin files, windows temporary files, old compressed files, offline files and so on, it gives you the choice as what you want to get rid of once you initiate the disk cleanup command, then the disk defragmenter is to tool that pretty much compacts your files together on your disk so that the disk can access your files easier on your disk drive, which will lead to your computer working a little faster or much faster depending on how badly your system if fragmented, when you system is fragmented its the same as you having an filing cabnet in your office and you having every file out of order and of course it will make it hard for you to find your files quickly, well thats the same with your hard drive, when your harddrive or your disk drive is fragmented it makes it hard for your system to locate files quickly which thast why it makes your system slower if you computer is fragmented badly, so thats what the defragmenter does it organized your files on your disk drive and makes it easier for your system to access them
How does defragmenting improve the performance of your hard disk?
Some file format system (eg.NTFS) are known to be very messy at managing files.When you save a new file, it's like throwing stuff into an empty room.Keep doing this and you'll start to realise that related stuff are scattered/fragmented around the room because you simply threw it in the room last time. A slightly different part of a folder might be across the room.This means it takes more time to find things so slower access to the files.Defragmenting is simply a process of making the files easier to access/find especially if you have a lot of stuff in there. This will only benefit HDDs though. If your "hard disk" does not make any noise when powered it may be a solid state drive and this process does not apply to it.
What is the difference between Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter?
disk clean up cleans all the unwanted files that have been left in your harddisk like the temp files , internet temprary files , the recycle bin contents, ... etc. the disk difragment is the process by which the files are arranged on the harddisk to speed up the system ie when u work on your computer for hours the hard disk does not have time to arrange the files that u save coz it is working so fast so it save it on the nearest free space, with time these files will be spread all over your hard disk and need to be arranged and that where u use the difragementation. hope that will help
Is defragmentation more helpful or hurtful for your computer?
Back in the day of PATA133, Pentium II CPUs it was useful.Since back then due to the slower transfer speeds, slower CPU any improvement in reading data helped.You could see improvements, maybe in the seconds range.As SATA rolled out, CPUs became faster, transfer speeds became faster, file systems improved to help prevent fragmentation.SATA also has a function called Native Command QueuingThis is where the hard drive reads data in closest location to read head rather than logical order.This also helped with performance as fragmentation had a slightly less of an impact.These days you might see 1/10th of a second on the same kind of fileBUT WHAT EVER YOU DODO NOT DEFRAGMENT AN SSD, THEY DO NOT NEED IT AND DOING IT WILL REDUCE THE LIFE OF THE SSD