How To Defragment Your Hard Drive In Windows 10

Do you feel that the performance of your computer is lagging?  Or do you feel that the hard drive of your computer is operating with lesser efficiency? Or do you feel that your computer is slowed down even performing basic operations? If the answer is yes for all of these questions then it is a clear indication that you need to defragment your hard drive. Now if you have another question about what is defragmentation and how to defragment your hard drive then don’t worry we will answer all these and other questions in this article. So without wasting any time let’s quickly start the article and learn how to defrag a pc and improve its performance.

What is Defragmentation?

First thing, what is defragmentation? Don’t have an idea, nothing to worry about as most of the windows users are unaware of this term. We all know that whatever data resides in our PC is stored in the hard drive. This means if we want to store any data we need to request a hard disk and when we want to retrieve the data then also we need to request the hard drive. This is because all the read and write operations carried on our PC are performed on the hard drive.

Now what happens, with the time, the data blocks that constitute to create files scattered at different locations around the surface of your hard drive. In other words, it gets fragmented. And the process is called fragmentation. In general if fragmentation is at the basic level then it doesn’t affect much but if more and more of your data is fragmented then it drastically degrades the performance of your PC or laptop, and then comes the need to defrag your laptop.

But how does the process of defragmentation help? So folks, defragmentation moves all those fragmented blocks of data so that they come close together in the physical space. And this tremendously speeds up the read time when it comes to accessing data on the disk. Obviously, if the stored data is stored properly then can be accessed quickly. And then you feel that the read/write operations are performed faster than before.

Note:

If your laptop has a solid state drive then you need not to worry about how to defrag a laptop. As the storing and accessing of data is carried out in a different way on a solid state drive and therefore they don’t require fragmentation. But yes, an external conventional hard drive needs defragmentation just like the internal hard drive. But if you don’t have a solid state drive and your PC/laptop and have a conventional hard drive then let’s move further to learn how to defrag a PC.

How to Defragment Your Hard Drive in Windows 10:

Windows provides you with an inbuilt option of defragmenting your hard drive. So to defragment your hard drive just follow the below steps:

1. Press the Windows key on your keyboard or alternatively click on the search box located on the taskbar.
2. Now in the Windows search bar type, Defragment. This will show you the option of Defragment and Optimize Drives in the Start menu. Click on the option to launch the Optimize Drives window.
3. On the Optimize Drives window you will find a complete list of all of the drives in your system on which the process of defragmentation can be performed. If you are unable to see any of your drive in the list then it is because that drive is formatted with exFAT file system and Windows 10 can only optimize the drive that is formatted in the NTFS filesystem.
4. Next, select the drive from the list that you would like to defragment and then click on the Optimize button.
5. Now on a conventional hard drive it will start the defragmentation.
   Note: On SSDs it will run a TRIM command that can boost up the operation speed. But it really is not needed as Windows does this automatically in the background.
6. Now, if the disk is fragmented, clicking on the Optimize button will start the defragmentation process. As soon as the process starts you will see a process indicator in the Current Status column.
7. Once the defragmentation process completes, the status in the Last Run column will update to the current date. And the Current Status column will read OK (0% fragmented).

Confirmation That the Drive Has Been Successfully Defragmented.

That’s it. The status of  OK (0% fragmented) is a confirmation that the drive has been successfully defragmented. Windows 10 also provides you an option to schedule the optimization process. So if you wish you can schedule the defragmentation process in the Optimize Drives window by clicking on the “Turn On” button that is in front of the “Scheduled Optimization” option.

The benefit of turning on Scheduled Optimization is that now in the future you do not need to remember to do it on your own. Close the Optimize Drives window and start using your computer as usual. You will be glad to see a boost in the performance after defragmenting your hard drive.

If you need a better user interface and want to free up space along with defragmenting your hard drive then we suggest you try some best available software to defrag Windows 10 hard drives. These tools have a lot of other options that not defrag your hard drive but also optimize it by removing the duplicate files and redundant and temporary data.

Conclusion:

So folks this is all on how to defrag a hard drive on your Windows 10 computer. We hope that after the defragmentation process you can see an overall optimization in performance of your computer.