How to Defragment the Windows 10 Hard Drive

This practical guide walks through how to defragment the Windows 10 hard drive, explains the main requirements, and highlights common issues that may appear along the way.

The process of finding fragments of data or files and reconstructing all of these fragmented data or files, then arranging them into a linked block is called defragmentation. This process increases data retrieval efficiency and access time, reduces file system fragmentation, and allows for faster and more efficient use of archives.

Hard drive gets fragmented after a long time and data gets fragmented when your computer saves data and stores them in multiple locations on the hard drive. This reduces the performance of the computer. To make your computer run efficiently and smoothly, you can use Windows 10's built-in tool to defragment all fragmented data or files. 

Method 1: Use the Defragment tool available on Windows 10

Step 1: Open Start and search for Defragment and Optimize Drives, then press Enter to open Optimize Drives.

Step 2: Select the drive you want to optimize and click Analyze. If you have an SSD drive, this option is greyed out and unavailable.

Note: You always need to analyze the hard drive first to see the percentage of fragmented parts. If the fragmentation is less than 10%, then you do not need to optimize the hard drive as it is not suitable for defragmentation.

Step 3: Click the Optimize button to start defragmenting your hard drive.

Step 4: When the defragmentation is complete, click Close to close the window.

Method 2: Use Command Prompt

Step 1: Press the key combination Window + X or right-click the Start Menu.

Step 2: Click on Command Prompt.

Step 3: Select Yes to allow Command Prompt (Admin) to run as administrator.

Step 4: Enter defrag C: command to start defragmenting your hard drive.

With the simple steps above, you are finished defragmenting the Windows 10 hard drive. When you do this, all the fragmented data or files move to a closer location and The free storage space of the hard drive is also pooled for faster use. As a result, future data or files will be stored in the defragmented storage space on your hard drive.