How To Perform Disk Defragmentation To Keep Your HDD/SSD/USB Perform Well In Windows 7/8/8.1/10

Hello folks, I hope you all are doing well at your home. Today, I'm going to discuss with you regarding the fragmentation of your physical drive (HDD/SSD/USB). Don't worry if you are not aware of this process, I will explain this process in detail and also share with you the steps on how to overcome it.

Whenever you perform any operation (such as download, copy or delete files) with your physical drive, the system will convert those files in binary and stores them into blocks. For easy understanding, you can refer to the below image.

In the above GIF, you can imagine that all the square boxes are memory blocks of your physical drives. Now, assume that different colors in the GIF suggest different files stored in the memory blocks. In the beginning, you can see the colors are not set in contiguous order. For instance, if you want to make all the red color boxes in a contiguous manner, you need to move other colors to some other free space and then move the remaining red blocks in the first row to make it contiguous. You can follow the same process for other colors as well.

Now, you are most probably aware of the fragmentation process, but you might be thinking about how to overcome this issue in your system, right? Don't worry, it's a quite simple process to defragment the fragmented blocks. Just follow the below steps and you're done!

Steps to perform defragmentation for your physical drive

The first step is to open the file explorer. You can either open it by pressing the "Windows button + E" at the same time or you can just click on "My Computer" or "This PC" on the desktop or you can simply run the command "explorer.exe" in the command box.
Now, right-click on the drive on which you want to perform the defragmentation and then select the "Properties" option from the context menu.

In the properties windows, select the "Tools" tab.

In the Tools tab, you find a section called, "Optimize and defragment drive". In this section, click on the "Optimize" button.

Once you click on the "Optimize" button, it will open up a window in which all of the logical drives listed. There you need to select the drive on which you want to perform the defragmentation. You can select multiple drives by using the "Ctrl" or "Shift" keys from the keyboard. Before starting the defragment process, we will first analyze the selected drives to know how many % of the drive is fragmented.

It might take a few minutes to analyze the selected drives. Once it finishes processing, it will show you the % of the fragmentation for the selected drives. Now again, you can select the drives and then click on the "Optimize" button to start the defragmentation process.

Once you click on the "Optimize" button, it might take from several minutes to a few hours depending on the size and degree of fragmentation of your drive. You can still use your computer during the defragmentation process. It will perform around 8 to 9 passes to finish this process.

Once it finishes all the passes, you can see the "Last run" column will be updated to the current time and the "Current status" will show "OK (0% fragmented)". It means the selected drive is successfully defragmented.

Yupppiieeeeee! your drive is now fully defragmented. Wasn't it indeed an easy process to follow? You can follow the same steps to perform defragmentation for other drives. Also, there is an option available to schedule the defragmentation process in which you can also select how frequently your drive should be defragmented.

Steps to schedule the defragmentation process

In the same window in which all the drives are listed, click on the "Change Settings" button.

It will open up a new window. Select the option "Run on a schedule (recommended)". It will automatically run the defragmentation process (every week by default) in the background.

Click on the dropdown to change the frequency for this scheduled process. You can choose whether you want to optimize your drives on "Daily", "Weekly" or "Monthly" basis. I prefer to select the "Weekly" frequency.

Apart from selecting the frequency, you can select the drives on which you want to perform this operation. Click on the "Choose" button beside the "Drives" section.

It will open up a window listing all the drives of your system. Select the drives that you want to include in the scheduled process and click "OK". I recommend selecting all the drives on the list.

Now, click on the "OK" button. Hola! You just configured the scheduled optimization. Now your system will automatically perform the defragmentation for after every 1 week (the frequency you selected from the dropdown) to keep the drives up to date.

Apart from your internal physical disk, you can also perform the same steps to optimize your external HDD, SSD, or USB. This option is available in all windows (i.e. windows 7,8,8.1 and 10).

I hope this post helped you to optimize your physical disk performance. Please subscribe to my page on Facebook and share it with your friends and family members.

Still, having problems? Feel free to post your problem in the comment box.