Some popular commercial defraggers include Diskeeper, PerfectDisk, and Auslogics Disk Defrag. But there are many third-party defraggers that claim to do a better job than Windows.
Windows includes a Disk Defragmenter utility that will get the job done.
Defragging also strives to maximize free space so that future files are less likely to be fragmented. It would take a much longer time to find, sort and stack all the pages, than if it was in one neat pile, right?ĭefragging stitches fragmented files back together and writes each file to one contiguous section of the hard drive. Think of it like a printed document, scattered all over your home. This motion takes time and degrades performance. The problem with fragmentation is that the read-write head of the drive must move around a lot more to read the entire file. Although the file appears as a single chunk of data to you, it may actually be scattered all over the hard drive, in dozens of little pieces. The same thing can happen with a large download. So the file gets broken up into two or more pieces, which are stored in different locations on the hard drive. It may no longer fit between the files where it was stored previously. For example, if you add a chapter to your Great American Novel, the file is bigger than it used to be.
How often you should defrag depends on several factors.įiles become fragmented in the normal course of reading, writing, expanding, and deleting them. Defragmenting your hard drive's files is one of the most effective ways to boost overall system performance.
And considering that it won't do it any more efficiently than the program you've got, it's best to not even worry about it.Actually, they could both be right! By the time you finish reading this, you'll see why. Plus, all it could do is create the risk of downloading some 3rd party program that potentially has malware or something else on it. There are no real efficiency gains or anything to be had. Whatever your computer comes with is perfectly fine. That used to be the case, but not anymore. Should I get a 3rd party defragging program? If so, what defrag program do you recommend? If you have pretty large drives and regularly upload or remove large files, you might want to tweak the default defrag option to more frequently than weekly.Īs a rule of thumb, if your computer is 10% fragmented or more, press the "optimize" button, and then change the settings to optimize your drive more frequently.
To know if you're okay, and you have Windows 7 or newer, or OSX, you can simply type in "defrag" or "optimize drives" and you should be able to see what percent of your drives are fragmented. For most people, this is more than enough. However, there are certain people that could benefit from defragging more frequently. Usually this happens naturally on a weekly basis. Most modern operating systems do it automatically at this point. Solid State Drives write differently, so they never need to defrag. Solid State Drives are also becoming more popular and they work differently. These days, you almost never have to manually run a defrag program This is natural and unavoidable with any regular hard disk because of the way they work internally How often should I run a defragging program?Īlthough you may remember having to run these sorts of programs in the past, that's rarely the case now. On your computer, when files are saved, deleted, moved, they change spaces inside your computer, a part of your file might be split into different locations.ĭon't worry though. It helps to know what defragging or defragmentation is first. When should I defragment (defrag) my computer? What is fragmentation?