How To Defrag Windows 11 – How to defragment a hard drive in Windows 11 Let us show you how to defragment your Windows 11 hard drive using all the possible options provided by the operating system, and we will tell you exactly what hard drive defragmentation is and why is necessary
Many people say “my computer is slow” and others answer “try defragmenting your hard drive”. This process has historically been one of the best ways to improve computer performance and increase the speed of reading or writing on a hard drive. However, times have changed, and today it is not so necessary. So when should you defragment your hard drive in Windows 11? Is it better to use a built-in tool or a third-party tool? Is it really necessary to perform this process in your case? All these questions will be answered in the following guide.
How To Defrag Windows 11
Defragmentation is the process of changing the order of the hard disk. Its main purpose is to join different parts of a file in adjacent areas to avoid empty or occupied spaces between them. This problem is called “fragmentation” and occurs when a file is split into different pieces and spread throughout the file system.
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This is because the operating system failed to store the entire file in adjacent slots. Using the fastest path, it fragments it and distributes the parts it could not store together with the rest to free up disk space. As the user adds and deletes files, the fragmentation becomes greater and greater, with small pieces of files scattered across the hard drive.
The effect of fragmentation is to reduce read and write performance, as the disk must make longer physical trips to read an entire file. This affects the overall speed and stability of the system.
Defragmentation in Windows 11 aims to consolidate files and place them in contiguous spaces, making them easier to read. Of course, as time passes, the files become fragmented again. Therefore, defragmentation is part of the regular maintenance that should be done on your computer.
Now that you know exactly what defragmentation is and why it’s crucial, you may be wondering if you really need to perform this process on your computer. Also, you should know that this is only necessary if you have a mechanical hard disk or HDD. In case your computer only has an SSD, it is not necessary to defragment. In fact, if you force a defrag with a third-party tool (Windows does not allow you to do this with its native application), you can damage the SSD storage drive.
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However, even if your computer has an SSD drive, we encourage you to continue reading as we will also explain how to optimize SSD drives in Windows 11.
Before giving you the relevant pointers for defragmenting the HDD or optimizing the SSD of your computer, we have put on the table different ways to access the original Windows tool.
Of course, a shortcut is available in the drive properties dialog, which you can open from File Explorer. Find it this way:
Let’s move on to the final part of this guide, where we will tell you how to defragment Windows 11 with and without apps. Let’s see.
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Following one of the above steps will bring you to the Windows Drive Optimizer. You should know that depending on whether your hard drive is SSD or HDD, this application offers you the appropriate option for each type of drive.
In our case, Windows allows us to optimize the drive, since it is a solid state drive. If we had a mechanical disk or HDD, the defrag option would be shown here. In any case, you should know that the two processes are different and that you approach the improvement of the unit’s performance from different perspectives.
As an alternative, we recommend Defraggler, an application available for free. Once installed, it offers you the option to optimize or defrag your drive. It also has performance analysis tools.
Although it is a much more complete tool than the native one of Windows, you must keep in mind that you will be able to defragment all types of drives with it, even if they are SSDs. So, be careful when choosing the process you want to follow in your device. Otherwise, you may end up defragmenting your SSD, which is not recommended.
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Defragmentation is one of the ways to improve your performance and make your computer faster, so it is recommended to perform it regularly.
Fragmentation is a normal process and will happen to every hard drive sooner or later and needs to be repaired.
There are several ways to defragment a hard drive, and Windows already has several useful tools that can help you with this, but you can also use specialized defragmentation software.
How To Defrag Your Hard Drive In Windows 11
Defragmentation has not changed much in Windows 11 and is almost the same as in Windows 10, so you should be familiar with it.
If you haven’t used defragmentation before, be sure to read on to learn how to defragment your computer and what this procedure really means.
When working with files on a hard drive, the parts are stored in different sectors, and to access them, the drive needs to be turned to a specific sector so that the head of the hard drive can find it.
However, when files are moved or deleted, the sectors on the hard disk become empty, creating space between the data. As a result, the hard drive has to work harder to access that specific data, causing performance problems.
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Defragmentation will reorganize the data and put it into sectors that are close together so that the hard drive can access them faster.
The main benefit of defragmentation is performance improvement. Because SSDs are 10 to 20 times faster than the best hard drives and have no mechanical disks to read, there is no need to defrag.
This means that data is read digitally and can be retrieved from flash memory in a fraction of the time it takes for a hard drive to move heads.
Another reason is longevity. SSDs last less than hard drives because they have a limited number of write cycles.
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This means that moving files and writing them during the defrag process will reduce the life of your SSD by using its write cycles.
3. When the window opens, you will see a list of all your drives and their current defrag status.
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4. Select the drive you want to analyze and click the Analyze button. We have an SSD installed so we haven’t actually defragmented it. You should only perform this procedure on HDDs.
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7. Wait for the process to complete. Note that the process may take some time depending on the level of fragmentation.
Your Windows 11 computer has a built-in application that you can use to defrag your hard drive. It is called Defragment Optimize Drives and it can be used to easily optimize your computer.
As you can see, using Windows 11 defrag is easy, but if you want a specialized tool, we recommend Smart Defrag for more advanced options.
There are also a few hidden commands that can be useful. To defragment all available disks on your computer, use the following command:
How To Defrag Your Hard Drive In Windows?
Defragmenting your SSD is not recommended, but you can optimize it instead, without risk. The process is called harvesting and you can access it as you would an HDD, using the steps above.
The trim action identifies areas on the disk with unused data. In other words, files that have been deleted and are waiting to be overwritten.
This is because when you delete a file, it is not deleted from the disk. They are just marked as free and available space. But after the trimming process, the data will be deleted.
It is an active way to optimize your SSD, but it is not as effective as the defrag process for HDDs.
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Defragmenting your HDD from time to time or on a schedule actually extends the life of your HDD unlike an SSD.
Of course, it also makes it faster because the system finds the data it is looking for much faster than on a fragmented disk.
However, you should also consider upgrading yours