Definition of fragmented
1
: broken or separated into distinct parts
- Another fragmented language group is the Austroasiatic family, whose most widely spoken languages are Vietnamese and Cambodian.
- —Jared Diamond
- The reality seems to be that the global audience for movies has become increasingly diverse and fragmented, which runs against Hollywood's obsession with finding that magic common denominator.
- —Peter Bart
2
computing
: having related or associated pieces of stored data disorganized in a way that makes them more difficult to access
- Fragmented files require much more work to read than contiguous files, because to do so DOS must chase down each sector, possibly moving the disk head back and forth many times. Each of these … slows the task at hand and results in additional wear and tear on your hard disk.
- —Brett Glass
- You probably won't notice a marked performance boost unless your hard drive is extremely fragmented.
- —Doug Stanley
