Defrag C Drive Windows 10

[Zee Petty]

Defragmentationreverses the process your computer uses to break up data when it saves files to your hard drive. Defragging reformats your drive, reconstituting the files that were fragmented when they were written (saved) to your disk.

Hard disk access is a highly mechanical process, even though so many other computer components are purely digital. And disk access is the slowest part of computing. It can typically take 5-15 milliseconds for your computer to access the bits and bytes on a traditional hard disk drive (HDD), whereas accessing data on a modern solid state disk (SSD) or in RAM is done in a fraction of a millisecond.

Aside from the time it takes to access files, the overall throughput of hard disks is also low. Typical HDD speeds are 100 MB/sec for larger files and 0.5-1 MB for small file fragments (which are more common in day-to-day operations). Check out our detailed guide to learn more about the differences between SSDs and HDDs.

Imagine you clean up your computer by deleting five GB of data from your hard disk, leaving a five-GB gap in the middle of space otherwise occupied by Windows, your applications, and data files. The next day, you download the next hot game, which may be about 20 GB. Your hard disk stores the first five GB of the game in that gap you recently freed up, and it breaks up the remaining 15 GBs into fragments and stores them into other free spaces or slots them at the end of the occupied disk space.

Now your new game is split up, or fragmented, into two or more pieces. The read/write head of your mechanical hard disk now has to piece together the files for the game when you launch it. Stitching those files together takes more time than it otherwise would if the data were kept in one continuous block of information.

Defragging a traditional hard disk drive is safe and easy, and it keeps your disk healthy. Regular defragmentation and other maintenance tasks help your computer run smoothly, and the risk of damage to your hardware or files is extremely small, even if the process is disrupted mid-flow.

You have full control over which drives, folders and files you defrag. Or simply use the default settings and let Defraggler do the work for you. Simple enough for every day users and flexible enough for advanced users.

This MSDN forum post seems to suggest that, at least on Windows 8, defragmenting an SSD drive will just cause the TRIM command to be sent to the drive, but there's no word on what actually happens if you try to defrag an SSD drive on Windows 7 (aside from the fact that it shouldn't happen automatically).

I just remembered - I've moved some folders (Users and ProgramData) from my SSD drive to my normal drive using junctions. This question suggests that this shouldn't have any effects at all on the defragmentation process, but could it have an effect on the "last run" in Disk Defragmenter?

Windows 7 usually detects SSD disk after this has been installed or connected and integrates it properly. This also includes the detection that some services are disabled, which would restrict the functionality, performance and service life of the drive. First of all, you should check whether the automatic defragmentation is disabled. This is not the case, you should disable the automatic deactivation for the disc manually.

I think though that it should defragment on demand if you tell it to. What if you want to add a new partition to the 'end' of the drive? You would need to defragment and consolidate the data to the beginning of the drive. Obviously the 'end' of the drive is a dubious phraase with SSDs, but as SSDs kind of emulate a mechanical drive and work within the mechanical paradigm for compatibility reasons, you may still need to consolidate the data.

just for your information if you want to defrag you might use the tool Contig its freeware from sysinternals (bought by Microsoft), after running it on an SSD today in verbose mode it showed it performed defragging on the disk. (which had trim support).

In reality, with a MTBF of over 100 years sometimes, do not worry the first five years about defragmenting or not. You will only have some descendance in performance in write cycli, but not that desastrous as they "tell on internet about SSD's".

Full performance tests with writing an SSD full is also not that good, but when you do sports and trainings and you aim for testing running above 30 km/h, it is not that good for your body neither. Which does not mean you would have to drop this competitive tests, I presume... We want to live indeed, I want my SSD to work also. And working and living includes usage damage. We really would NOT like it differently!

I recently bought a new laptop that runs windows 8. It has been about a month and I wanted to clean the system up a bit to keep it running smooth. I tried to defrag the system hard disk drive but when I click "analyze" or "optimize" the optimize drives window disappears for a millisecond then reappears and states the system still "needs optimization". It doesn't matter how many times I click on "optimize" It simply repeats the previous event. I can clean my removable disk and recovery hard drive without a problem.

I would recommend a backup and a chkdsk before the defrag simply because you have unusual behavior from the GUI based defrag option. The latter can be run from privileged command line by executing chkdsk c: /r

Once this is complete, reboot your system and then check with the GUI options to see if you have the same behavior. Just keep in mind that it may take a long time to complete the defrag depending on the current state. You may want to run it overnight and check the following day.

Microsoft Drive Optimizer (formerly Disk Defragmenter) is a utility in Microsoft Windows designed to increase data access speed by rearranging files stored on a disk to occupy contiguous storage locations, a technique called defragmentation. Microsoft Drive Optimizer was first officially shipped with Windows XP.

Defragmenting a disk minimizes head travel, which reduces the time it takes to read files from and write files to the disk.[1] As a result of the decreased read and write times, Microsoft Drive Optimizer decreases system startup times for systems starting from magnetic storage devices such as a hard drive. However, defragmentation is not helpful on storage devices such as solid state drives, USB drives or SD cards that use flash memory to increase speeds, as these drives do not use a head. Doing so may decrease lifespan for these types of devices.

As early as the end of 1982, the IBM PC DOS operating system that shipped with early IBM Personal Computers included a Disk Volume Organization Optimizer to defragment the 5-inch floppy disks that those machines used. At this time, Microsoft's MS-DOS did not defragment hard disks. Several third party software developers marketed defragmenters to fill this gap. MS-DOS 6.0 introduced Microsoft Defrag.[2] Windows NT, however, did not offer a Defrag utility, and Symantec was suggested by others as a possible alternative for the utility.[3]

Initial releases of Windows NT lacked a defragmentation tool. Versions through Windows NT 3.51 did not have an application programming interface for moving data clusters on hard disks.[4] Executive Software, later renamed Diskeeper Corporation, released Diskeeper defragmentation software for Windows NT 3.51,[4] which shipped with a customized version of the NT kernel and file system drivers that could move clusters.

Microsoft included file system control (FSCTL) commands to move clusters in the Windows NT 4.0 kernel,[4] which worked for both NTFS and FAT partitions. However, Windows NT 4.0 did not provide a graphical or command-line user interface.[4]

Disk Defragmenter first shipped as part of Windows 95 and later shipped with Windows 98 and Windows Me, licensed from Symantec Corporation. It could be scheduled using a Maintenance Wizard and supported command line switches.[5] In the version of Disk Defragmenter included with Windows 95 and 98, if the contents of the drive changed during defragmentation, the program paused, rescanned the entire drive, and then resumed the process from where it had left off.[6] This quirk was removed in the Windows Me version of Disk Defragmenter.

Windows Disk Defragmenter was updated to alleviate some restrictions.[9] It no longer relies on the Windows NT Cache Manager, which prevented the defragmenter from moving pieces of a file that cross a 256KB boundary within the file. NTFS metadata files can also be defragmented. A command-line tool, defrag.exe, has been included,[10] providing access to the defragmenter from cmd.exe and Task Scheduler. In Windows XP, if the Master File Table (MFT) is spread into multiple fragments, defrag.exe and the GUI version can combine the MFT fragments during defragmentation.[11] Windows XP and later has introduced Boot Files Defragment function, this function is enabled by default and can be disabled in Registry.[12]

In Windows Vista, Disk Defragmenter includes an option to automatically run at scheduled times using Task Scheduler and uses low CPU priority and the newly introduced low priority I/O algorithm so that it can continue to defrag using reduced resources (less CPU and disk read/write activity) when the computer is in use. The user interface has been simplified, with the color graph, progress indicator, disk analysis and fragmentation information being removed entirely.

If the fragments of a file are over 64 MB in size, the file is not defragmented if using the GUI; Microsoft has stated that this is because there is no discernible performance benefit since the time seeking such large chunks of data is negligible compared to the time required to read them.[13] The result, however, is that Disk Defragmenter does not require a certain amount of free space in order to successfully defrag a volume, unlike performing a full defragmentation which requires at least 15% of free space on the volume. The command line utility, Defrag.exe, offers more control over the defragmentation process, such as performing a full defragmentation by consolidating all file fragments regardless of size.[14] This utility can be used to defragment specific volumes or to just analyze volumes as the defragmenter would in Windows XP.

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