File fragmentation causes a huge degradation in system performance, and over time can bring your system to a near crawl. Fragmentation causes your computer to use excessive resources (memory and CPU time) to complete tasks related to reading and writing files. This unnecessarily increases the work your computer must do to support the applications you are running. In cases of severe fragmentation, some applications may not run at all. Backup is one of the few operations that may actually read an entire disk. As disks grow in size, the time taken by the system to perform a full backup increases proportionally. Fragmentation can cause applications to launch more slowly, file access to take longer, system boot/shut down to slow, slows down hibernation/resume from hibernation, causes videos to drop frames and music to skip. Fragmentation slows down your virtual environments as the virtual hard drive on the Windows host becomes fragmented and the Windows guest file system fragments.
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