How To Perform Defragmentation In Windows 10

How to Defragment Your Hard Drive in Windows ten

Over fourth dimension, files on your hard drive become fragmented, and your desktop or laptop slows down because information technology has to bank check multiple places on your drive for those pieces. To have your estimator run more efficiently, utilize the built-in tool in Windows to defragment those files. Here's how and when you should do it.

Windows ten, like Windows 8 and Windows 7 before it, automatically defragments files for you on a schedule (past default, once a week). Nevertheless, it doesn't always run consistently, so if you notice files are taking longer to load or you just want to double-check every calendar month or and so, you can see how fragmented the drive is in Windows.

A note about Solid State Drives (SSD): SSDs work differently than traditional mechanical difficult drives. Conventional wisdom is that SSDs don't need to be defragmented and doing so can also wear downwards the drive. Nevertheless, Windows does defragment SSDs once a month if necessary and if you have Arrangement Restore enabled. This isn't something to worry about, though, because the automatic defragmentation is meant to extend your bulldoze'southward life and functioning.

So with SSDs, merely let Windows do its thing and don't worry about defragmentation. You lot tin can use the Optimize Drive tool beneath to do a general optimization of the drive, including sending the TRIM command to optimize functioning. This doesn't do a traditional defrag on the SSD, though. For your mechanical drives, hither's how to defragment your drive in Windows 10.

How to Defrag Your Hard Drive in Windows 10

1. Open up 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 take a SSD, this option is grayed out and non available.

3. Check the percentage of fragmented files in the results.

In that location'south no hard and fast rule nearly how fragmented your drive should exist before you defrag information technology. You might want to keep your fragmentation percentage under 5% or so, however, and so that the defragmentation process doesn't take too long to cease.

four. If you want to defragment your drive, click Optimize. Information technology's best to practice this when you don't need to employ your computer for anything else, so you can allow Windows defragment the bulldoze efficiently.