Need more help? Join the discussion. A subscription to make the most of your time. Try one month free. Was this information helpful? Yes No. Thank you! Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help. Can you help us improve? Resolved my issue. Clear instructions. Easy to follow. Fragmentation isn't just a disorganized collection of files and folders. A dedicated defragging tool is what you need. Disk Defragmenter is one such defragger and is included for free in the Windows operating system.
That said, there are many third-party options as well, the better of which do a considerably better job at the defragmentation process than Microsoft's built-in tool. See our List of Free Defrag Software for full, updated reviews of the best ones out there. Defraggler is hands down our favorite one. Defragging is pretty straightforward and all of those tools have similar interfaces.
For the most part, you simply choose the drive you want to defrag and select Defragment or Defrag. The time it takes to defrag a drive depends mostly on the size of the drive and the level of fragmentation, but expect most modern computers and large hard drives to take an hour or more to fully defrag.
No, you really should not defrag a solid-state hard drive SSD. For the most part, defragging an SSD is a wholesale waste of time. Not only that, doing so will shorten the overall lifespan of the drive.
A solid-state drive is a hard drive that has no moving parts. SSDs are basically overgrown versions of the storage used on flash drives and digital cameras. As you may have already guessed, if a drive doesn't have moving parts, and so nothing to take up time as it moves around gathering all of a file's fragments together, then these fragments can essentially be accessed at the same time. All that said, yes, fragmentation does occur on solid-state drives because the file system is mostly to blame.
However, because performance isn't impacted nearly as much as it is on non-SSDs, you really don't need to ever defrag them. Another reason it's unnecessary is that you shouldn't defrag them! Doing so will cause them to fail more quickly than they would otherwise. Here's why:. SSDs allow a finite number of writes i. Each and every time a defrag is run on a hard drive, it has to move the files from location to another, each time writing the file to a new location. This means the SSD would endure constant writing, over and over again, as the defrag process progresses.
So, without a doubt, don't defrag your SSD. Not only is it unhelpful, but it's also ultimately damaging. Many defragmenter tools actually won't even give you the option to defrag SSDs, or, if they do, they'll prompt you with a warning that says it's not recommended. Just to be clear: do defrag your regular, old-fashioned, "spinning" hard drives.
Defragmenting a hard drive doesn't move the reference to the file, only its physical location. In other words, the Microsoft Word document on your desktop isn't going to leave that place when you defrag it. This is true for all fragmented files in any folder. You shouldn't feel as if you need to defrag your hard drives on any sort of regular schedule.
Like all things, however, this will, of course, vary depending on your computer usage, the size of the hard drive and individual files, and the number of files on the device.
If you do choose to defrag, just remember it's completely safe and there are absolutely zero reasons to spend any money on a program to do it: there are many , very good free defrag tools out there! Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Some files are bigger than others and if the new file is bigger than that location, than part is written to that one and the other part to the next available location, if you were to delete that new file then the next file written might only take half that space and so and so forth.
Eventually your left with many files broken up into multiple locations all over the hard drive. The hard drive is a mechanical device with spinning disks, which means if the file you need is split into 5 different locations, then the needle must wait for the disk to spin to the area it needs to read that chunk of the file, forcing it take longer than if the file was all in one location.
When the drive is being defragged the computer is moving the different parts and regrouping them in one location.
The longer it has been since you last defragged the computer, the longer it will take to move the jumbled parts. The second thing the defrag processes worries about is where on the disk the files are being moved to.
A quick lesson in physics will show you that if you want on the outer edge of the disk you will be moving faster than if you stand on the inner edge, this is because the outer edge is longer and has to travel farther to make a full rotation. This means that data that is near the outer rim can be accessed faster and thus the more often the file is accessed the higher priority it would have to be located on the outer edge.
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