Data on your hard drive can become fragmented over time. This makes it more difficult and therefore slower for the computer system to consult the data.
Windows has always implemented tools to defrag data on the hard drive and Windows 10 or Windows 11 is no exception.
Although hard drives provide cheap, fast, and reliable bulk storage of digital data, they suffer from one major problem.
Using protocols that date back to the days when computer data was stored on large rolls of magnetic tape, the data is written sequentially to the hard drive so that it can be read out more quickly. This is fine at first, as the data is stored in neat blocks or sectors that are easy for the system to find.
A brand new hard drive will use its storage space efficiently for the best possible performance, saving files in a neat order. However, over time you will inevitably delete some files and the hard drive tries to deal with these changes by splitting the data files into the available empty space on the drive.
This can mean splitting your files into chunks spread all over the drive and which can radically slow down access times, both when saving data and when you come to read the data from the drive.
The system does not lose the data, but a hard drive is a mechanical device with moving parts and the physical process of moving the read-write head back and forth across the platter from one sector to another takes a finite amount of time confiscated (SSD aside).
The more the head needs to be moved, the slower the access time will be. After a few years of heavy use, a hard drive can become so fragmented that it slows down.
This is one of the reasons why solid state drives (SSDs) are becoming increasingly popular. Because they have no moving parts, their data rates must remain consistently high no matter how much data is stored or how often it is changed.
Fortunately, Windows includes an option to “defrag” your drive. This is an automatic process that reorganizes the data on your hard drive into easily accessible contiguous sectors, making the best use of available space and significantly reducing access time.
In previous versions of Windows, this was a manually selected process that you had to remember to run regularly. However, Windows includes an option to automatically perform an optimization and defragmentation procedure on all connected drives on a regular basis.
If your system uses a hard drive, as most do. In any case, it is worth doing at least the first five steps of this instruction to see if your system would benefit from defragmentation.
If you use an SSD, it does not need to be defragged, because SSDs store data differently than physical “hard drives”.
Defrag hard drive in Windows
It is important that you are an administrator in Windows. You need an administrator account to defrag your drive in Windows.
Open Windows Explorer.
Click on My Computer in the left menu. Right-click on the hard drive in the list of connected drives that you want to defrag.
Click Properties in the menu.
In the properties menu click on the tab: Extra. In the hard drive's extra menu settings, click the Optimize button.
This opens the Optimize Stations window. Here you will see another list of all hard drives associated with your system. You will also see when the optimization was last run, and how fragmented the disk currently is.
If your system is operating at peak efficiency, they should all be at 0%.
If one of your hard drives is fragmented, select the hard drive by clicking on the drive in the overview, then click Optimize.
If it is a large hard drive with significant fragmentation, this process can take a long time.
After you have optimized (in other words defragged) the hard drive, you can also choose to do this automatically. Click Change settings on scheduled optimization.
I recommend setting scheduled defragging to weekly for a system you use daily.
I hope this helped you! Thank you for reading.
Also read: 10 tips to make Windows better and faster.