Optimizing Hard Drives – The Role of Defragmentation
There’s a high chance that you’ve already heard about the need to defragment your drive on a regular basis.
Your hard drive is a very hard-working hardware component. As such, you need to ensure that its health stays optimal for as long as possible.
There are many things that can hurt your drive, the most important of which is the way that you use your PC. Hard drives keep track of everything that you do and store information essential to performing everyday tasks.
There’s a high chance that you’ve already heard about the need to defragment your drive on a regular basis. If you haven’t done it in a while, or at all, there’s a high chance that your PC might be experiencing a performance drop.
But what’s the relation between a defragmented hard drive and performance? To explain this, we need to cover various aspects.
How Do Hard Drives Work?
Before we offer an in-depth explanation of why your hard drive might cause your PC to slow down, we need to go over the basics. Here’s what you need to know:
Hard drives have been used in PCs since around mid-1980s. Since then, the technology has advanced but the way they work has stayed pretty much the same.
Basically, a hard drive stores plenty of information on a magnetic platter. The information is read and written using the read-write arms and head. For the average PC user, tens of thousands information pieces are stored in the PC’s hard drive after just a half year of use (faster than that if you browse the net a lot).
To perform normally, Windows needs to communicate with the drive non-stop. To make this communication easier, a process called fragmentation has been discovered.
What Is Fragmentation?
Hard drives store all the information in pieces in certain locations. This isn’t an issue if your hard drive is new, as there are chunks of uninterrupted free spaces. However, as you install a large number of programs, download a lot of files, and remove some of them, you break the continuity of free spaces.
This is when fragmentation gets in the way of optimal performance. When you install a program onto a fragmented drive, its files fill up empty spaces that deleted files left behind, but not continuously but rather scattered all over the drive.
This makes it hard for the program to reach its files, since the PC needs to look for them in many different locations. This exhausts your PC and brings it to a crawl.
Freeing up your drive space can be somewhat helpful, but you’re still creating empty pockets that fragment the drive even further. This is why defragmentation is essential to making sure that the drive stays healthy.
What is Defragmentation?
The process of defragmentation identifies pieces of information that are scattered across the drive and moves them so that they’re stored in a contiguous space. This doesn’t always mean that the files are perfectly aligned, but they’re much closer to ideal.
This ensures that programs can read the files much easier and faster, which boosts your PC’s performance. There are many defragmentation solutions out there, including Windows’ built-in one, but not all of them are equally good.
When Should You Defragment?
Ideally, you should have the defragmenter set to run automatically every week or so. If you leave your drive fragmented for a long time, you might notice significant drops in your PC’s performance. You can recognize hard drive-related issues fairly easily.
First of all, certain programs and functions might take longer to load. The loading time will depend on the fragmentation level, which is likely to increase with time. Demanding programs might not even load at all, and if they do, you might experience frequent stop and go.
Another thing that you might notice is glitchy audio, video, and gameplay. Everything that you run needs to access files stored on the hard drive, and fragmentation causes the programs to skip and lag while looking for the scattered files.
The same thing can happen with internet browsing. Since browsers temporarily store some of the information about the pages you’re loading, it might take a while to load all of their contents, despite having a strong network connection.
If you notice any of these issues, the first thing you should do is defragments your drive. Even though there are other causes for these issues, a fragmented drive is among the most common.
How to Defragment?
As mentioned, Windows has a built-in defragmentation software. To access it, go to ‘This PC/My Computer’ and right-click on the drive. Go to Properties > Tools, then click ‘Optimize’. When the new window pops up, go to ‘Optimize’ again to start defragmentation.
Even though it is simple and accessible to everyone, this method is pretty limited. First of all, it’s a slow and inefficient process. It will take a while just to analyze the disk. After the whole thing is complete, fragmentation will start building up again, so you’ll have to repeat this on a regular basis.
This is why iolo came up with a better solution. iolo’s System Mechanic is packed with features that let you maximize your drive’s health. First of all, the AcceleWrite technology prevents much fragmentation from building up in the first place. This means that it will take a far longer period of time for your drive to start causing trouble.
Even when this happens eventually, Drive Accelerator will ensure a fast defragmentation which won’t interfere with your PC usage. This will allow you to maintain your drive’s health without having to do anything, since Drive Accelerator can be scheduled to run automatically.
The Final Word
Now that you understand what defragmentation does, you should consider performing it if you haven’t already. As you can see, a fragmented hard drive can cause issues and kill your productivity.
Even if you defragment your drive on a regular basis, you might be frustrated by the limitations in Windows’ built-in Defrag. If this is the case, iolo’s System Mechanic or System Mechanic Pro are your best bet. They make the whole process much easier and faster and ensure that your drive is free of fragmentation all the time. System Mechanic professional is a part of iolo's System Mechanic Ultimate Defense software suite.
