On a recent episode of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” the good guys had captured the laptop computer of a very bad guy, but when one detective asked the other about the contents, the reply was that nothing could be accessed, because the drive had been “defragged.”
That may sound good, but unfortunately for the show's veracity, the fact is defragging has nothing to do with removing files or blocking access to data on a computer. Quite the opposite is true.
When the computer stores a file on your hard drive, the assumption may be that the entire file is stored in one place. Often, however, parts of a file are stored in different places on the disk, so when you want to retrieve that file, your hard drive has to be accessed at several different locations to assemble the file.
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