This occurs when a hard drive writes a file in multiple segments instead of in a physically contiguous area. A higher level of fragmentation means that most files are fragmented, and many files contain lots of fragments. A low level of fragmentation implies that more files are in one piece, and that if files are fragmented, they are only in a few fragments. For example, say you have two files, file a and file b. You write them both to a hard drive. A low level of fragmentation may be represented by: aaaaabbbbb. A high level of fragmentation may be represented by: aabbababa.

This definition is in context to Computer Technology. See more contextual defintions for Fragmentation.