Is Defragmenting a Hard Drive Good or Bad for My Computer?
Hard drive defragmentation will be good or bad for the hard drive will depend upon different factors. Main thing about this is the type of hard drive you are using. Usually, normal mechanical hard drives are defragmented and Solid State Hard drives are not defragmented. Solid State Hard Drive will wear faster if excessive read and writes operation is performed and defragmentation process will wear the Solid State Hard Drive faster.
Defragmentation of the hard drive will improve its performance. It will make read and write operations smoother. Your Windows operating system comes with a disk defragmenter program that will help you to defragment your hard drive.
What does the Defragmentation Process do?
When we perform read and writes operations on the Hard Disk it creates fragments of the space on the Hard Disk. Read and Write operations include copying the files, moving the files, installing and uninstalling the applications and other read and write operations performed by the operating system also.
Defragmentation process will rearrange the files on the hard drive in continuous order so that no space remains in between the files. Fragmentations on the hard drive will slow down the performance as the operating system will have to work harder to navigate through the files. The space between the files is called fragmentation and to rearrange the files so no space remains between is called defragmentation.
Benefits of Defragmentation for Hard Disk Drives
You will feel the need to defragment the hard drive when your computer becomes slow and sluggish. You will know when your computer becomes slower and you take time to perform simple tasks.
Defragmenting the hard drive will help you to speed up your computer. It will put all the files together so that your hard drive does not have to move unnecessarily in order to find the files. It will improve the fetching time of the files and will speed up the read and write time of the hard drive.
Your files will be opened faster and the speed of the computer will be improved significantly.
Drawbacks of Defragmentation:
Defragmentation on SSD i.e., on Solid State Drive is not recommended as it won’t improve its performance and will make your hard drive wear out faster. SSD and other flash drives do not have moving parts as they fetch information from the flash memory. SSD and other flash drives work with algorithms that will shuffle the data and will not let the fragmentation take place.
Power Loss in between:
When your computer is arranging the data while defragmenting the hard drive, it is not recommended to turn off the power. However, we cannot control the power loss and during the power loss our files can be erased and unrecoverable.
If the files that are being fragmented are erased or get corrupted due to the power loss belonging to a certain program or operating system then the program will become unusable or your operating system will become inoperable.
Hard drive crash:
If the hard drive moves in between the defragmenting then it can damage the hard drive. This usually occurs when using the laptop as we move the laptop. So, it is recommended that you do not move the hard drive in between the defragmentation process.
How to defragment the hard drive and improve the performance of the computer:
Your Windows operating system comes with disk defragmenter. This simple program will help you to defragment the hard drive easily. This simple program will help you to analyze the hard drive and according to the percentage of fragmentation you can optimize the hard drive.
This program will also let you schedule the defragmentation process so that you can defragment your hard drive when you are not working on your computer.
Use third party program
There are different third party programs that will not only defragment your hard drive but it will also optimize your computer.
You can find many disks defragmenter programs that are easy to use and filled with lots of other features. You can use any of the top rated disk defragmenter programs for defragmentation of your hard drive.
Verdict:
Defragmenting a mechanical hard drive will always improve the performance of your computer. However, make sure that you are not overdoing it as it may crash your hard drive.
Also, it is not recommended to defragment an SSD hard drive as all the excess read and write operations will wear the hard drive. Also, SSD and other flash drives do not require defragmentation.
You can manually defragment the hard drive using the inbuilt disk defragmenter in Windows 10 or you can use a third party program that will help you to defragment the hard drive and will also optimize your system.
There are different disk defragmenter programs that come with other features. You can use different other features to perform different operations on your computer.
