How To Defrag On Windows 10

How to Defragment Your Hard Drive in Windows 10

Over time, files on your difficult drive go fragmented, and your desktop or laptop slows down considering it has to check multiple places on your bulldoze for those pieces. To accept 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 earlier it, automatically defragments files for you lot on a schedule (by default, one time a week). However, information technology doesn't always run consistently, and then if you detect files are taking longer to load or yous just want to double-check every calendar month or so, you tin can run into how fragmented the bulldoze is in Windows.

A note about Solid State Drives (SSD): SSDs piece of work differently than traditional mechanical hard drives. Conventional wisdom is that SSDs don't need to be defragmented and doing and so can likewise vesture down the drive. Notwithstanding, Windows does defragment SSDs once a calendar month if necessary and if y'all have Organization Restore enabled. This isn't something to worry about, though, because the automatic defragmentation is meant to extend your drive's life and performance.

So with SSDs, just permit Windows practice its affair and don't worry about defragmentation. Yous can employ the Optimize Drive tool below to exercise a full general optimization of the drive, including sending the TRIM command to optimize functioning. This doesn't exercise a traditional defrag on the SSD, though. For your mechanical drives, here'south how to defragment your drive in Windows 10.

How to Defrag Your Difficult 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. Notation that if y'all have a SSD, this option is grayed out and not bachelor.

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

In that location's no hard and fast rule about how fragmented your drive should be earlier yous defrag it. You might want to proceed your fragmentation percentage nether five% or so, however, and so that the defragmentation process doesn't take likewise long to stop.

4. If you desire to defragment your drive, click Optimize. It's best to do this when you don't need to use your computer for annihilation else, then you can allow Windows defragment the drive efficiently.