How To Do A System Defrag On Windows 10

Every time you create, delete, or edit a file on your hard drive, some of that data becomes fragmented, and pieces of it are stored in various parts of your difficult drive. Over fourth dimension, this tin cause your computer to slow downward because information technology takes more time for your bulldoze to read all the scattered pieces of information in a file. That's why it's so of import to know how to defrag the difficult drives in your computer, then you can keep it running smoothly. But what is defragging, and should y'all defrag an SSD?

What is Defragging?

Defragging is a process where your computer organizes the contents of your hard drive, then it can efficiently locate and read files. This frees up space on your computer and makes it run faster.

These days, computers have an automatic defragmentation process built-in. From Windows 7 onwards, PCs can at present automatically defrag your drives on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

However, sometimes lots of files can get fragmented before your drive is scheduled to be defragged. This can happen when y'all've been doing a lot of work on your reckoner. If your computer has been running wearisome, hither'southward how to manually defrag your Windows 10 computer.

To defrag a drive on your computer, click the magnifying glass icon in the bottom-left corner of your screen and type Defragment and Optimize Drives into the search bar. Then select a drive and click Optimize.

How to Defrag a Drive on a Windows 10 Figurer

Click the magnifying glass icon in the bottom-left corner of your screen.
Then type Defragment and Optimize Drives into the search bar.
Then click Open. You can also hit Enter on your keyboard. The Optimize Drives window will so open up, and you lot will meet a listing of drives on your computer, along with the kind of each drive, the last fourth dimension they were defragged, and their electric current status.
Select the hard drive you want to defrag. You tin run into how fragmented your bulldoze is under Electric current status, and if information technology needs optimization or not.
Click Analyze. If the current status says OK, and so there'due south no need to optimize. If it says Needs optimization, and so y'all might want to defrag that hard bulldoze.
Click Optimize. Wait for the process to finish. You will know your bulldoze is defragged when it says the condition is OK and 0% fragmented.

If you want to set your estimator to automatically defrag a bulldoze or change how often your computer defrags a drive, click the Modify settings button.

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Should You Defrag an SSD?

While solid-state drives practice become fragmented just like traditional difficult drives, yous should not defrag an SSD. Not merely is it unnecessary, information technology could too shorten the lifespan of your drive.

A hard disk drive (HDD) stores data on magnetic plates. These plates spin at thousands of revolutions per infinitesimal while a dedicated read/write caput sits above them. When you fragment these kinds of drives, it lines upward the information on the spinning plates. This means the head doesn't have to motility around as much to read or write data.

However, SSDs don't accept mechanical moving parts like HDDs. Instead, they shop information on memory chips, which means they can read and write fragmented data as fast as defragmented data.

Also, the memory fries in SSDs degrade every time y'all erase and write new data to them. And so, defragging an SSD will really cause it to die faster. That's why you should not manually defrag an SSD.

However, you don't demand to remove your SSD from automated defragging. This is considering Windows 10 uses a different kind of defragmentation for SSDs. You lot tin find out more virtually this concept on this blog postal service past Microsoft'south Scott Hanselman.

If yous desire to know more about the differences betwixt an SSD and HDD, check out our guide here.

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