If access to the hard disk slows down, this could be due to frag­ment­a­tion. This is a common cause, at least with older storage media, which is why Windows includes its own program for de­frag­ment­ing hard disks. External tools, that once were very popular, are no longer necessary for Windows 10 users. The included de­frag­ment­a­tion tool is easy to find and access via the context menus in File Explorer. Here, we’ll show you how to de­frag­ment your disks in Windows 10.

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What is de­frag­ment­a­tion?

The effective speed of a hard disk depends not only on the re­volu­tions per minute (RPM) or data through­put rate in KB/s (kilobytes per second), but es­sen­tially on how the files are arranged on the hard disk. Ideally, all files are located one after the other, each as a closed block on the hard disk. When reading the data, the read head of the hard disk therefore only has to pass over the data block once in order to read the complete file. In practice, however, this ideal state exists only shortly after a new hard disk has been formatted in Windows i.e. on the operating system used.

When deleting files, gaps appear on the hard disk, which later have to be filled by other data fragments. That’s how, over time, many files are dis­trib­uted in several single fragments on the hard disk. Access to the files remains seamless, but will take longer than usual. When de­frag­ment­ing, all fragments of a file are searched for and saved as a coherent block. In doing so, the contents of the in­di­vidu­al sectors must be phys­ic­ally read.

De­frag­ment­ing – here’s how it’s done

In most cases the feature to auto­mat­ic­ally de­frag­ment in Windows 10 is suf­fi­cient. However, if you want to manually de­frag­ment your hard disk, you can follow these steps:

Step 1: Right-click the drive you want to de­frag­ment in Explorer and select ‘Prop­er­ties’ from the context menu.

Image: Windows 10: context menu in Explorer
De­frag­ment­ing your hard disk starts with the ‘Prop­er­ties’ tab in the context menu of your selected drive.

Step 2: Next, click on ‘Optimise’ within the ‘Tools’ tab of your disk.

Image: Windows 10: ‘Properties’ of the hard disk
Via ‘Prop­er­ties’ in a drive you can find the option to de­frag­ment.

Step 3: Select the desired drive and start the de­frag­ment­a­tion process by clicking on ‘Optimise’. Hard disks with a frag­ment­a­tion of 10 percent or less don’t have to be de­frag­men­ted.

Image: ‘Optimise drives’ in Windows 10
‘Optimise drives’ in Windows 10

You can also launch de­frag­ment­a­tion in Windows 10 by opening the Start menu and selecting ‘De­frag­ment and optimise drives’ from ‘Windows man­age­ment programs’.

Tip

For more tips on how to speed up Windows 10, read our article ‘Speed up Windows 10: 8 tips for better per­form­ance’.

How long does de­frag­ment­ing take?

How long a de­frag­ment­a­tion takes mainly depends on the size and fill level of the hard disk. With automatic de­frag­ment­a­tion, there is no loss of time. A complete de­frag­ment­a­tion process can take several hours for large and very full hard disks. The file al­loc­a­tion table which holds the in­form­a­tion on how in­di­vidu­al files are addressed and the dir­ect­or­ies must be written back to the hard disk im­me­di­ately after each change, which slows down the process con­sid­er­ably. A pre­requis­ite for suc­cess­ful de­frag­ment­a­tion is also that there is enough free space on the hard disk to tem­por­ar­ily store the data that is being moved.

Does de­frag­ment­a­tion even make sense anymore?

Modern data systems no longer require manual de­frag­ment­a­tion. Automatic de­frag­ment­a­tion that works in the back­ground is far more efficient.

SSD data carriers should not be de­frag­men­ted anymore. In this case, de­frag­ment­ing the drive can do more harm than good.

Automatic de­frag­ment­a­tion

Windows schedules automatic de­frag­ment­a­tion of all hard disks by default. Hard disks with automatic op­tim­isa­tion are almost always displayed with a frag­ment­a­tion of 0 percent.

  1. To see and adjust the automatic op­tim­isa­tion settings, click the ‘Change Settings’ button in the ‘Optimise Drives’ dialogue box of the de­frag­ment­a­tion program.
     
  2. In the ‘Frequency’ section of the next window, set the frequency of op­tim­isa­tion. ‘Monthly’ is quite suf­fi­cient even for heavy users.
Image: ‘Optimise Drives’ window in Windows 10
Settings to auto­mat­ic­ally optimise hard disks.
  1. When clicking on ‘Choose’ you can select a drive that should be selected for automatic op­tim­isa­tion. Activate this feature only for HDD storage and not for SSD.
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