Do You Still Have To Defrag Computers

[Leroy Turcios]

Imaginethat all of the information on your hard drive is a load of laundry. There are lots of different types of clothing and colors, and they all get mixed together in the wash. All of your clothes are still there, but they're jumbled together and take up a lot of space. This is similar to what happens over time to the data on your hard drive. Everything gets moved around and separated (or fragmented) and your computer has to work harder to find everything it needs.

When you finish doing the laundry, you usually sort your clothing back into organized piles so they can go back into your closet or dresser. When you defrag your hard drive, your computer is doing something similar. It's taking all of the data and reorganizing it so your computer can find things more easily and make the most of its available space.

Defragging your computer can both solve and prevent a number of problems. If you don't regularly defrag your hard drive, your computer may run slowly and/or may take a long time to start up after you turn it on. If a hard drive is too fragmented, your computer may freeze up or not start at all.

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Over time, a hard drive can begin to operate with less efficiency due to fragmentation in the file system. To speed up your drive, you can defragment and optimize it in Windows 10 using a built-in tool. Here's how.

Over time, the data blocks (fragments) that make up files can become scattered in multiple locations around the surface of the hard disk. This is called fragmentation. Defragmenting moves all of those blocks so they are located close together in physical space, which potentially speeds up read times when accessing data on the disk. However, with modern computers, defragmentation isn't the necessity it once was. Windows automatically defragments mechanical drives, and defragmentation isn't necessary with solid-state drives.

Still, it doesn't hurt to keep your drives operating in the most efficient way possible. You might also need to defragment external hard disk drives connected via USB, as they may not be plugged in when Windows runs its automatic defragmentation.

The Optimize Drives window will appear, and it will list all of the drives in your system that are eligible for optimization and defragmentation. If one of your drives doesn't show up, it may be because Windows 10 can only optimize drives formatted in the NTFS filesystem. Drives formatted as exFAT will not appear in the list.

On a hard disk drive, this runs a defragmentation routine. On SSDs, it runs a TRIM command, which can potentially speed up the operation of your drive, but it isn't really necessary as Windows does this in the background with modern drives.

Congratulations, your drive has been successfully defragmented. If you'd like, you can schedule regular defragmentation sessions in the Optimize Drives window by clicking the "Turn On" button in the "Scheduled Optimization" section. That way, you won't have to remember to do it manually in the future.

Sorry this was a few days ago on a computer that I do not have any more. There was the Internet browser and the task manager open at the time only. But we had 12 rows of red boxes that were almost solid all the way across. So that's what it looked like. Should we do it again. I don't understand all the fragmented boxes or files. I just did my laptop right now and I had no red boxes left on it.

We turned off Restore. This is an XP Pro computer. So I always turn off Restore when doing a defrag. We then re-instated the restore points. So I guess we don't know what causes these dozens and dozens of red fragmented squares. I didn't think that we could figure it out. I will look elsewhere for the answer. Apparantly Smart Defrag may not be the program to use. I have been using it for two years now though.

Back-up files? I am not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean with and external drive? Or do you mean on the C Windows drive compressed? Usually when I back up then I do it on an external drive. Why would someone have Back-up files on their C? That is not a back up, but I guess it could be if someone wanted to duplicate their files in another folder.

Wow, I guess to keep this program on people's computers they should adjust their colors and show a colored box with the word Compressed files or files that cannot be defragged otherwise people may think that their Smart Defrag is not working properly. I call this losing customers, read on.

If I go back to this guys computer today he will not have the program any more. I just know him. He will go with Defraggler or Auslogics or just the Windows defrag. So this is a lost customer because of poorly written help files.

Defragmenting a hard drive can improve a computer's or laptop's performance and speed. To reduce fragmentation, a disk optimization tool typically uses compaction to free up larger areas of space. Certain disk defragmentation tools might try to keep smaller files together, especially if they're often accessed sequentially.

Fragmentation doesn't happen as much in Linux-based file systems as the Linux journaling system stores the data across multiple locations in the disk and automatically moves it around as soon as it senses fragmentation.

Defragmentation can solve and mitigate problems, such as slow speeds, freeze-ups and extended boot times of a computer. If there's not enough contiguous space to hold complete files on an HDD, files can become fragmented and the storage algorithms on the disk separate the data to fit it inside the available space. Defragmentation consolidates these fragmented files so all the related pieces are aligned together.

A fragmented hard drive is similar to a huge, jumbled-up load of laundry, where all the different clothing types and colors are mixed up. Once the HDD is defragmented, the system performance improves because all the jumbled-up data is reorganized and stored appropriately.

Most contemporary operating systems have built-in disk defragmentation tools that perform the defragmentation process automatically. However, some operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows 7 and beyond, can be defragmented manually.

Since modern versions of both Windows and macOS come with built-in optimization tools, there's no need to manually perform defragmentation, especially if the computer is on all the time. However, if a device is routinely shut down after each use, its built-in defragmentation utilities might be prevented from running automatically.

Fragmentation occurs gradually due to the processes that HDDs use to store data. As files are regularly deleted and written, the HDD may not be able to write new files contiguously (to the same physical space on the platter).

Needless to say, the architecture and structure of the file system plays a role in determining how quickly a drive becomes fragmented. NTFS (widely used for modern Windows computers) is designed to allow defragmentation utilities to continue serving file requests during defragmentation. Additional optimizations reduce the chances of significant fragmentation.

Disk Defragmenter might take from several minutes to a few hours tofinish, depending on the size and degree of fragmentation of your harddisk. You can still use your computer during the defragmentationprocess.

Windows 8 and up auto-detects the number of passes required depending on the SMART status, number of errors, size of disk, time since last inspection, etc. You can keep it running in background and does not affect your performance much on a decently speced device. It can take anywhere from 1-2 passes to 40 passes and more to complete. There is no set amount of defrag. You can also manually set the passes required if you use third party tools. Ho much fragmented was your drive?

Note 1: Defraggler can defrag NTFS and FAT hard drives, as well as exFAT format USB drives. We do not recommend that you defrag USB drives that have not been formatted as exFAT. Generally, they will not benefit by being defragmented and theoretically defragging can shorten their lifespan.

Dear Lifehacker,

I hear people talk about "defragging" their computers all the time as a way to make it faster, but I'm not really sure what that means. What does defragging do and is it something I need to do to my computer? How often?

Most hard drives have spinning platters, with data stored in different places around that platter. When your computer writes data to your drive, it does so in "blocks" that are ordered sequentially from one side of the drive's platter to the other. Fragmentation happens when those files get split between blocks that are far away from each other. The hard drive then takes longer to read that file because the read head has to "visit" multiple spots on the platter. Defragmentation puts those blocks back in sequential order, so your drive head doesn't have to run around the entire platter to read a single file. Image by XZise.

If you have a solid-state drive (SSD) in your computer, you do not need to defragment it. Solid-state drives, unlike regular hard drives, don't use a spinning platter to store data, and it doesn't take any extra time to read from different parts of the drive. So, defragmentation won't offer any performance increases (though SSDs do require their own maintenance).

Windows 7 and Windows 8 automatically defragment your hard drives for you on a schedule, so you shouldn't have to worry about it yourself. To make sure everything's running smoothly, open up the Start menu or Start screen and type "defrag." Open up Windows' Disk Defragmenter and make sure it's running on a schedule as intended. It should tell you when it was last run and whether your drives have any fragmentation.

Note: A lot of you are finding that Windows 7's "automatic" defrag leaves a lot to be desired. All the more reason you should check in with Disk Defragmenter every once in a while and make sure it's doing its job! Windows 8 seems to be much better about running it regularly.

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