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It can take a few minutes to many hours, depending on your partition size, disk RPM, and the severity of the fragmentation. The process requires copying and deleting many file fragments. That’s why your computer will seem faster after defragging a severely fragmented drive. It also rearranges all the free space on your disk into one big chunk so that new files can be written sequentially in the future. It reassembles the file fragments next to each other on the physical platter so that the hard drive head can read them in one sweep. Your hard drive will have to work harder to read the files, making your system appear slower.Īs the name suggests, defragging reverses this fragmentation process. Now, imagine what happens after many files are written and deleted from your boot drive, something that Windows frequently does.

The disk head has to visit two places and travel a larger distance to read the new file.Īs a result, reading the file takes longer than reading a file stored in a single location on the drive. The new file is now fragmented: divided into two or more parts when stored on the hard drive. Then it skips the non-empty sectors until it finds another empty sector to write the remainder of the new file. The hard drive starts at the former position of the first file and writes byte after byte until it reaches the beginning of the second file. Now, suppose you delete the first file and want to save a larger one. You can write multiple other files afterward, and they’ll all be stored in sequential order. The head starts from the first available sector and writes data in sequence until the file is completely written to the disk. Suppose you want to write your first file to an empty hard drive. These drives consist of multiple spinning platters and a mechanical head that reads and writes data from and to these platters. To explain how defragging works, we need to explain how mechanical hard drives store data. To understand the rationale behind this answer, let’s explore how defragging works and why it might be helpful. Once you defrag your drive, it’ll be relatively fine for a while, but doing it every day won’t speed up your computer in any way. However, many of these truths aren’t necessarily true anymore.Īdvice that used to be true a few years ago may not apply anymore.ĭefragging is one example of outdated advice.ĭefragging has become less relevant as SSDs have gradually replaced hard drives in consumer PCs and laptops.ĭefragging can improve your computer speed, but only if your Windows loads from a hard drive.Įven then, you’ll only see noticeable gains if your hard drive is nearly full or you haven’t defragged your drive in at least a few months.ĭefragging is most effective when you have written and erased many files over a long time, resulting in many tiny file fragments. The computer world is full of myths that have some element of truth.