Every computer user wants his device to work stably and allow you to use its resources in full and for its intended purpose.
In order to realize these desires, all components of the computer must be serviceable and ready to work, but this does not always happen.
A special impact on the speed of the computer have storage devices - hard drives and solid state drives, which in modern realities often work in conjunction.
If to solid-state drives (SSD-disks) of questions not so much as structure and specificity of their work in many respects exclude intervention of users, here to habitual hard disks (HDD) of questions still it is a lot of.
The answers to one of these questions to the HDD and will be discussed in this article.
What is defragmentation and why is it needed
Let us stop at the basis. It is no secret that the disc is written sequentially, regardless of whether it is new or not.
For convenience, visualize a 100GB hard drive in the form of a ring divided into 4 equal parts.
As a basis, we take that the user purchased a hard drive and installed 2 games and 2 programs in turn. The data was written to the disk in the form of conditionally 4 equal parts (clusters). Accordingly, the operating system will not encounter difficulties when accessing the recorded files, as they are written in one piece and sequentially.
Now let us make a new introduction and assume that the user has removed the conditional "Program 1" and "Program 2" and carried out the installation of "Game 3", along with the recording of new information, but in a smaller volume.
Visually it will look like this
As you can see, the user's disk remained free 35GB, but they are not distributed in order, and fragmented.
Now let's assume that the user has installed another game at number 4 (fill it in red), which has recorded information on 20 GB.
So, what did the user get in the end? His 100 GB hard drive has 4 games with a total capacity of 85 GB, another 15 GB is free, but they are divided into 2 fragments of 10 and 5 GB respectively.
So what is defragmentation for? The answer is simple, the defragmentation procedure will prevent all free clusters (collects them into a single free area) remaining after deleting, transferring, copying information to the conditional end of the hard disk. After the implementation of this procedure and will continue for sequential write.
Visually it can look like this:
What is it for? If you write to a fragment, for example, a volume of 5 GB, and the remaining information will be distributed on a fragment of 10 GB, the operating system will spend more time searching and reading all the information than if the information is written sequentially. This is the whole "salt" of the issue under consideration.
All the above example is just a rough visualization, which is given for the best understanding of the essence of the process under consideration.
Currently, the issue of the need defragmentation solved explicitly, despite working cords SSD+HDD to HDD is the need for SSD – this procedure is not required, given the specifics of the SSD.
How to defragment a Disk
For the implementation of this task does not require any third-party software, as the right tool is in the operating system Windows 10.
To run it, you only need to do the following:
- Press the "WIN+S" keyboard shortcuts and enter the phrase "Defragment";
- In the window that opens, select the desired disk and click on the "Analyze" button;
- After analysis, the utility will give you the percentage of fragmented parts of the total disk volume;
- You will need to click on the "Optimize" button to complete the defragmentation procedure.
Next, you can close the "Disk Optimization" window, but if you want to configure automatic defragmentation click on the "Change settings" button.
How often you want the Defragmentation
You can choose from three options for the frequency of launching the defragmentation procedure - it is "Daily", "Weekly" and "Monthly".
Taking into account the established practice, the best and most optimal option is "Weekly".
With this approach to optimizing the operation of storage devices, the procedure itself will not take much time, even if the disk volumes exceed 1 TB.
To start automatically, simply check the box "Run on a schedule" - "Weekly".
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is also worth noting the presence of third-party software, which has similar functionality, but has a slightly larger range of features, for example, more detailed visualization of fragmented objects.
Is it necessary in practice? It is up to everyone for themselves, but the capabilities of the regular utility are enough in full.
So, among the mentioned programs we note: "Defraggler" and "Auslogics Disk Defrag".