We shouldn’t underestimate the benefit of a defragmented hard drive.  Here’s how to do it.ADHERER

If you’re coming to this page, chances are you don’t know much about defragmenting or why it’s necessary, so here’s the basics.  And if you already know why you want to defrag your drive but just not how, go on and skip ahead.  BTW, this is for WindowsXP, but other OSes should have a similar set of steps.

The standard hard drive file storage format is a little odd to us humans.  Files are stored in small chunks, called clusters.  But we won’t go in too deep on this.  Just know that files are broken up into clusters and stored on the drive that way.  The FAT (File Allocation Table) makes note of which cluster contains the first bit of each file.  Then each cluster leads the way to the next cluster, in a chain, until the end of the file has been reached.

But these chains of clusters aren’t necessarily all together on the drive.  They could be totally scattered about the drive.  Realize that a hard drive is a spinning platter with a read/write head hovering over it, like a record needle (does that reference date me?).  So when the head is reading a file, it has to wait until that part of the disk spins under it.  This is called seek time.  And depending on how scattered the file’s clusters, you could wait many spins of the disk to get the entire file.

Defragmenting your drive will bring each file’s clusters close together so that the head will pass over each one in turn.  This vastly speeds up access time and the time it takes to read an entire file into memory for processing.  In the end, defragging your drive can make the computer snappy and seem like it was when it was brand new.

The first step is to open MY Computer.  Then right-click on the drive you want to defragment and select Properties.  Then click on the “Tools” tab.  You should see, in the middle of the window, a section called “Defragmentation” with a button that says “Defragment Now…”  Click on it.

Click the “Analyze” button and then “View Report”.  Scroll the top window down a tad to reveal the fragmentation info.

Since my drive is 40% fragmented and the files are 80% fragmented, defragging is definitely a good idea at this time.  Click the “Defragment” button if you feel that your drive requires it.  I would say anything over 15-20% fragmented requires a good defrag.

From this point, it’s just a matter of waiting for it to finish.  Note that your PC will run slower while this is going on, so you may wish to start this running before you leave the computer for the night.  Leave it on overnight and by morning you should have a nice fragment-free hard drive.