BTNHD Explained: PC Defragmentation!

Now, if you ask any PC tech guy how to make your computer faster, almost every tech will tell you to defrag your PC before purchasing anything.

What is defrag?

Defragmentation is process that reduces the amount of fragmentation. It does this by physically organizing the contents of the mass storage device used to store files into the smallest number of contiguous regions; it also attempts to create larger regions of free space.

Well, you really don’t need to with today’s modern operating systems. The reason for this is if you are using solid state drive in your computer, you shouldn’t be defragmenting the drive because you want to avoid excessive wear and tear on the drive.

Check this out, Windows 7 and 8 is smart enough to disable defrag for solid state drives. If you’re running Windows Vista make sure to disable the automatic defrag and upgrade your current operating system. For those, running Windows XP with solid state drive, you are crazy!

Okay, so you’re using Windows 7, Windows 8, or Vista did you know that your system is already configured to defrag on a regular basis. Actually, it’s configured to run 1AM every Wednesday. You can check yourself by opening up disk defragmenter and checking the schedule there. There is a problem here, because if turn off your PC every time after using it the defrag task will ever get a chance to run. I would recommend checking the defragmenter and if it has not defragged the drive for a while run it manually.

What if you not satisfy with Window defrag build-in software?

Well, there are some third-party defrag utilities, but unfortunately I don’t have solid proof that they improve performance better than the Windows default disk defragmenter. For what I hear, commercial defrag utilities definitely accomplish the task a little better by adding features like boot time defrag, boot speed optimization, tools for defragging the registry and it defrags system files a little better.

So the question pops up again, do you really need to run defrag on your machine?

Over the years, hard drive have gotten much faster at both sequential and random reads and writes the use of defragging has dropped a lot. Modern computers these days have giant hard drives with enough space that Windows doesn’t have to fragment your files in order to write them to the drive. If you’re trying to get every last drop of performance out of your hard drive then go defrag away! Or you could put some cash toward a new SSD, which would massively increase your machine performance.