Why should you defrag your hard drive and what exactly defragging is? Here you can find the answers and get how to defrag the hard drive.
As we all know, a file is something whole, a photo, a video, a song or any other file. But not all files are written into the hard drive as the whole thing. They can be divided into lots of small fragments. This happens when some places are not large enough to store a single whole file, in order to make full use of the spaces, the file data will be stored in different places. Then drive head may need to run around the entire platter to read that file. This would cause your computer to run slow down since it takes longer to read a fragmented file compared to a contiguous one. To speed up computer’s performance, you should defrag your hard drive all the time.
Defragging is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation in file systems. It will put all divided data of the file together and make the file contiguous. Then the drive head doesn’t have to run around the entire platter to read a single file.
Here is how to defrag your hard drive on Windows 8.
1. Swipe in from the right edge of the screen and tap search.
2. Enter Defragment in the search box, and tap Defragment and optimize your drives.
3. Under Status, tap or click the drive you want to defrag.
4. To determine if the drive needs to be optimized, tap or click Analyze.
5. Click Optimize.
Here is how to defrag your hard drive on Window 7.
1. Click Start menu and click All Programs.
2. Click Accessories and System Tools.
3. Click Disk Defragmenter. The Disk Defragmenter dialog will appear.
4. Select the drive one by one. Click on Analyze disk button to analyze each drive.
5. Click on Defragment disk button.
Here is how to defrag your hard drive on Windows Vista.
1. Click Start button and click All Programs.
2. Click Accessories and System Tools.
3. Click Disk Defragmenter.
4. Click Defragment Now.
Here is how to defrag your hard drive on Windows XP.
1. Click Start button and click Run.
2. Type Dfrg.msc in the run box and press Enter. You can defragment each of your drives individually.
Fragmentation is not the only reason which causes your computer to run slowly. But defragging hard drive won’t hurt your computer. You still should defrag your hard drive all the time.
But if you have a solid-state drive (SSD) in your computer, you should not defrag it. Unlike regular hard drives, SSD doesn’t use a spinning platter to store data, so defragging it won’t make any difference to read the data, even worse, it will reduce the life of your SSD.