Guide to Run Hard Drive Defrag on Windows 10 to Speed up Windows

This guide provides a practical overview of Guide to Run Hard Drive Defrag on Windows 10 to Speed up Windows, including its main features, benefits, limitations, and important considerations.

* Note : If your computer uses an SSD, you should not defragment this drive because it may shorten its life.

Method 1: Use the defrag feature of Windows 10

Windows 10 has built-in defragmentation and disk optimization. To use, you do the following:

Step 1: Open the Search tool on the Taskbar, type "defrag" and select the results found ( Defragment and Optimize Drives ).

Step 2: Select the drive you want to defragment, then click Optimize .

Method 2: Use third party software

There is a lot of software that supports hard drive defragmentation and adds many other useful features. Here I would like to introduce Smart Defrag - a famous product of IOBit.

You can download this software here: Download Smart Defrag. Please be assured that Smart Defrag is completely free to use (although there is still a paid option to upgrade to the PRO version).

After downloading and installing, you do the following:

Step 1: Open Smart Defrag. Each version has a different interface, but will generally look like the image below:

Step 2: Check the drives you want to defragment, then click the Smart Defrag button (or one of the other options on the side).

- Smart Defrag : Firstly analyze, then implement the most appropriate method of defragmentation.

- Analyze : Analyze the fragmentation rate for your drives and propose the most suitable defrag method.

- Fast Defrag : Defragment with maximum speed.

- Defrag & Optimize : Defragments fragmented files and completely reorganizes data on the disk to have more continuous free space, helping drive maximum performance.

- Large File Defrag : Defrag large files to increase read / write speed on the disk and enhance the durability of the disk.

- Free Space Defrag : Maximize read / write performance on disk by consolidating free space with large adjacent blocks.

- Defrag & Prioritize Files (Slow) : Smartly prioritize data on disk for maximum performance and extended data continuity. Note that this process can take a relatively long time.

Step 3: Wait while the defrag process is going on. Now you can choose to automatically shutdown / restart / hibernate or do nothing after the completion.

Step 4: After the defrag process is completed, click Finish to finish.

Above I have introduced two ways to defrag the hard drive on Windows 10 to speed up the computer. Hope this article will be helpful for you!