What is disk defragmentation and how does it work
- when should you defrag
- when should you defragment your hard drive
- when should you defrag your computer
- should you defragment a hard drive
Does defragmentation improve performance...
We still get quite a few questions about when and how to optimize storage devices.
How to defrag windows 10
Easy answer: The care and feeding of storage devices is either taken care of automatically by Windows, or it’s simply unnecessary. Mostly.
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Defragging
Defragging hard drives (not SSDs) has been of limited benefit since Microsoft switched to the NTFS file system.
Why? Because to a large extent, NTFS is self-optimizing.
Disk defragmenter windows 11Add Windows’ various tricks such as pre-fetch, better ordering of files, and hard-wiring important files to set locations, and there’s rarely any noticeable degradation in hard drive performance even after years of use.
That said, many external drives come formatted to FAT16, FAT32, or exFAT.
These might benefit from optimization after a lengthy period of heavy use. Whether the time you save during normal use after the fact adds up to the time you spend optimizing the hard drive, or the additional wear and tear on the drive are worth it, are debatable.
Back in the days of FAT, DOS, and slow 80MB
- how often should you defrag your computer
- how often should you defrag your laptop