Once the utility has scanned the selected partition(s), a fragmentation percentage will be displayed next to the drive.

If you would like to have the utility check multiple partitions at the same time, simply click on each partition while holding the Ctrl key to select them and click on Analyze all to have the utility analyze them.

Simply click on a drive to select it and click on Analyze to have the utility find out just how fragmented that particular hard drive partition is. You will see a list of all the drives on your computer in the Status section of the window, along with a number of each of their properties.Alternatively, you can achieve the same result by opening the Control Panel and navigating to System and Security > Administrative Tools > Defragment and Optimize Drives. Navigate to the Start screen, type “ defrag” into the Search field, and click on the search result titled Defragment and optimize your drives.To defragment a hard drive on a computer running on Windows 8.1, here’s what you need to do: This new utility still has the same old purpose, however – to defragment hard drive partitions and entire hard drives that have become fragmented.ĭefragmenting a hard drive maximizes the transfer rate of files and data to and from the hard drive, and it should only be done to hard drive – you should not try to defragment a Solid State Drive (SSD) or a USB drive. However, with the arrival of Windows 8.1, Disk Defragmenter was completely revamped and turned into the Optimize Drives utility, and it looks like it will remain the Optimize Drives utility for the foreseeable future.

Up until the days of Windows 7, this utility used to be known as Disk Defragmenter and had been changed to an impressive degree. The Windows Operating System has always come with a disk defragmentation utility built in to it. The more fragmented a hard drive is, the slower it will be.įragmentation on a hard drive can be resolved by simply defragmenting it – during defragmentation, all of the data stored on a hard drive is rearranged so that the imaginary blocks of data are stored contiguously and any breaks in the middle are eliminated. If, for whatever reason, breaks start accumulating between the storage blocks over time, the hard disk is said to have become fragmented.

Think of data on a hard drive as a chain of storage blocks – the hard disk will be fastest when all of the blocks are stacked one after the other with no breaks in between them. continuously without any breaks in the middle.

A computer hard drive runs the fastest (meaning that it is able to read files from and write files to itself at maximum possible speeds) when all of the data stored on it is stored contiguously, i.e.

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