Over time, files on your hard drive get fragmented, and your desktop or laptop slows down because it has to check multiple places on your drive for those pieces. To have your computer run more efficiently, use the built-in tool in Windows to defragment those files. Here's how and when you should do it.
Windows 10, like Windows 8 and Windows 7 before it, automatically defragments files for you on a schedule (by default, once a week). However, it doesn't always run consistently, so if you notice files are taking longer to load or you just want to double-check every month or so, you can see how fragmented the drive is in Windows.
A note about Solid State Drives (SSD): SSDs work differently than traditional mechanical hard drives. Conventional wisdom is that SSDs don't need to be defragmented and doing so can also wear down the drive. However, Windows does defragment SSDs once a month if necessary and if you have System Restore enabled. This isn't something to worry about, though, because the automatic defragmentation is meant to extend your drive's life and performance.
Sep 29, 2018 How to Optimize and Defragment Hard Disk Drive in Windows 10 at boot menu. Sometimes you might need to Optimize and Defragment Hard Disk Drive in Windows 10 when system refuses to boot in normal mode. Recovery environment lets open Command prompt using which you can run the defrag commands for the optimization. Nov 20, 2017 Defragment your Windows 10 PC. Content provided by Microsoft. Applies to: Windows 10. Optimizing your drives can help your PC run smoother and boot up faster. To optimize them: Select the search bar on the taskbar and enter defrag. Select Defragment and Optimize Drives. Select the disk drive you want to optimize. Select the Optimize button. How to defragment and optimize disk drives in Windows 10 Performance of your computer is directly related to disk performance. If drives on your computer are highly fragmented, file access on your computer becomes slower leading to overall low performance. How to Optimize and Defragment Drives in Windows 10 One of the best ways you can improve your PC's performance is by optimizing the drive. Windows includes features to help optimize the different types of drives that PCs use today. No matter which type of drive your PC uses, Windows automatically chooses the optimization that's right for your drive.
So with SSDs, just let Windows do its thing and don't worry about defragmentation. You can use the Optimize Drive tool below to do a general optimization of the drive, including sending the TRIM command to optimize performance. This doesn't do a traditional defrag on the SSD, though. For your mechanical drives, here's how to defragment your drive in Windows 10.
How to Defrag Your Hard Drive in Windows 10
1. Open the disk optimization tool by searching for 'optimize' or 'defrag' in the taskbar.
2. Select your hard drive and click Analyze. Note that if you have a SSD, this option is grayed out and not available.
3. Check the percentage of fragmented files in the results.
There's no hard and fast rule about how fragmented your drive should be before you defrag it. You might want to keep your fragmentation percentage under 5% or so, however, so that the defragmentation process doesn’t take too long to finish.
4. If you want to defragment your drive, click Optimize. It's best to do this when you don't need to use your computer for anything else, so you can let Windows defragment the drive efficiently.
When Windows is done, your drive should say 0% fragmented in the Optimize Drives utility.
More Tips
Defragmenting your computer's hard drive is a very important process that can improve the performance of your PC. Fortunately, Windows contains many tools to perform this important process. This tutorial will show you how to manually optimize and defrag your hard disk drive in Windows 10.
Way 1: Optimize / Defrag an HDD Drive Using Disk Defragmentation Tool
Optimized drives can help your PC run more smoothly and start faster, which is only for HDDs. For solid state drives, defragmentation can cause performance issues and even shorten the life of the drive. Therefore, defragmenting SSDs is not a good idea.
Step 1: Press Win + E to open File Explorer then navigate to the This PC.
Step 2: Right-click on the drive you want to defrag and select Properties from the context menu. When the Properties window appears, select the Tools tab and then click on Optimize.
Step 3: A new window will appear with details about your hard disk drives.
You can click on the Analyze button to checks whether your disk requires defraagmenting. If the file system on drive is more than 10% fragmented, then you should optimized it. Simply click on the Optimize button to begin the defragmentation.
To optimize drives by schedule in Windows 10, do the following.
If you want to configure automatic defragmentation, click Change Settings under Schedule Optimization. The next dialog will allow you to adjust the schedule settings, such as unchecking the Run on schedule box to completely disable it. Once the plan is enabled, you can change the frequency to daily, weekly or monthly. In addition, you can choose a specific drive to be automatically defragmented.
Way 2: Optimize and Defrag a Drive in Command Prompt
Defragment And Optimize Windows 10 For Audio Recording
Step 1: Right-click on Start Menu to open quick access menu, then select Command Prompt (Admin) opion.
Free jarte word processor. Step 2: Type the following command to optimize your C: drive:
defrag C: /O
Microsoft access real estate template. Replace the C: with the drive letter you need to optimize and defrag. For example, you can optimize and defrag D drive in Windows 10:
defrag D: /O
Way 3: Optimize and Defrag a Drive in PowerShell
You can also analyze and defragment your disks and drives manually via Windows PowerShell.
Step 1: Open Powershell and run it as administrator.
Step 2: Type the following command to analyze your drive. Look at the bottom of the output, it will advise whether or not you need to defrag the drive.
Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter D -Analyze -Verbose
Step 3: Defragment the current drive: Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter D -Defrag -Verbose
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