Fragmentation

In a computer operating system, fragmentation is a consequence of allocating and freeing differently-sized blocks of data storage. It results in the accumulation of small regions of free storage that are too small to be useful for allocation, even though in sum there may be more than sufficient free space. See defragmentation.

Fragmentation occurs both in memory allocation in RAM and in secondary storage devices such as hard drives.

Fragmentation is of two types: Internal and External