Where Is Defrag In Windows 10

If your computer's feeling ho-hum, it might be time to exercise a little maintenance. Defragmenting (or "defragging") is one of the nearly commonly recommended tasks in this area, alongside uninstalling programs, checking your PC's memory, and running a virus scan. Here'south how it works, and what y'all need to know.

What Is Fragmentation?

Defrag Windows 10

Traditional hard drives (sometimes known every bit HDDs) use spinning platters to store information in sequential "blocks" across each platter. If y'all delete some information, the drive will go back and fill those blocks when you write new data—sometimes leading to files getting split apart and stored on two (or more) different sections of the platter. That means the drive'due south head has to navigate to multiple places in order to read the file, thus slowing things downwardly.

Defragmenting your drive reassembles those files and combines your complimentary space back into one cake, making reading and writing faster. Y'all can meet a visual representation of this in the GIF to a higher place, from Wikimedia user XZise.

How to Defragment Your Hard Drive

Defrag Windows 10

Here'south the good news: unlike the onetime days of Windows XP, which required you to manually defrag your difficult drive once in a while, Windows 7, 8, and ten defrags your computer automatically on a schedule. So there's a skilful chance yous don't actually accept to exercise anything!

Even so, if you lot want to check the schedule and make certain information technology's running properly, striking the Start button and type in "defrag." Click the "Defragment and Optimize Drives" pick, and you'll be greeted with the optimization schedule, which lists all the drives in your computer—HDDs and SSDs alike.

Next to each drive, you should see its Current Status. If everything'due south running okay, your HDDs should read "OK (0% fragmented)," and you can meet when the drive was last defragged. By default, it should run once a week, just if it looks like it hasn't run in a while, you may want to select the bulldoze and click the "Optimize" button to run information technology manually.

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You should annotation that everything above only applies to traditional, spinning difficult drives—not solid-state drives (SSDs), which are becoming more and more mutual. SSDs are much faster than hard drives, and don't have any moving parts, so your calculator can read blocks of information just every bit fast from one spot on the NAND as from another. That means even if you have tons of fragmented files, your computer won't slow downward—and defragmentation isn't necessary.

That beingness said, SSDs do require another type of maintenance called TRIM, which erases old data y'all've already deleted, making file writes faster. If you have an SSD, the current status will probably but say "OK" with a note about when the TRIM control was concluding run. Again, y'all shouldn't need to intervene hither, just if it hasn't been run in a long time (or ever), y'all can select the drive and click "Optimize."

Most of the time, you shouldn't need 3rd-party tools to defragment your computer—they had their uses dorsum in the day, but for Windows 7, viii, and x, Windows' built-in schedule should be enough. If defragging doesn't speed your estimator up equally much as y'all'd similar, check out these other maintenance tasks as well.

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