What Is Defragmentation?
To understand what defragmentation is, you need to know how a hard drive works. Think of the latter as a train where the coaches store and carry data. Every time you add more data to your hard drive, it’s broken down into smaller pieces or fragments, and a new coach is added to the train to store that data. These coaches are added in a sequential manner. However, whenever you delete a file, the coach containing that particular file is emptied but not removed from the train completely, which creates an empty space. As a hard drive reads and writes data, more such spaces are created over time. Now, during the process of storing more data, the hard drive fills up the empty coaches with some fragments of data and creates new coaches for the remaining pieces. This results in data being scattered all across the hard drive. Even though it seems efficient that those empty spaces are finally being used, that’s not the case. The issue here is that whenever data fragments are stored farther away from each other, it takes a while for your computer to recollect it all before it can be presented to you again. This slows down the overall reading speed of that hard drive. This is another reason why hard drive-based computers tend to slow down when your storage is almost full. The process of reversing this breakdown and reorganizing the data on the hard drive is called defragmentation. These days Windows automatically defrags mechanical hard drives. However, it only works for drives that are physically connected to your motherboard. So, if you have an old or external HDD, it’s always a good idea to defragment it yourself for a smoother performance.
How To Defragment Your Hard Disk in Windows 10 and 11
Now that we know what defragmentation means, we can begin with the steps to do it manually on your PC.
1. Use the Disk Optimization Tool
Note: There’s no hard and fast rule regarding how fragmented your drive should be before you can defrag it. However, you should try to maintain the fragmentation level below 5% so that the defragmentation process doesn’t take too long. When Windows is finished with the process, the Optimize Drives program should show your drive as 0% fragmented.
2. Schedule Optimization
You can put this whole defragmentation process on an automated schedule from the same location.
3. Use the Command Line
Wait for the defragmentation process to complete. If you want to defrag your whole system except for your main drive, use this command instead: defrag /E X:. Here, X is the letter of the drive you want to exclude.
4. Use a Third-Party Defragging Tool
Instead of using the inbuilt defragging tool, you can also use third-party defragmentation tools like MyDefrag or Auslogics Disk Defrag to achieve the same results. Image credit: Pixabay
