How to do a Hard Drive Defragment

File fragmentation occurs on a daily basis. It will occur anytime you write a file. The amount of fragmentation will depend on how much free space you have on your hard drive.

A hard drive that has very little open space will have a higher amount of file fragmentation than say a almost new drive.

When you save a file to your hard drive it is written to what is called contiguous blocks, that is block a, block b, block c, and so on.

Block size will depend on what Operating System was used to create the partition and then format the hard drive, normally it is 4096 Bytes per block but can be as large as 64 K Bytes per block.

But if your hard drive is low on space then the file system can not always write your file to contagious blocks.

This causes the slow down in your performance because the file system has to find empty block to write your file and when you want to open the file it has to go find all the blocks that the file was written to.

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You can use the built in Hard Drive Defragment or you can purchase a third party product. For a Windows Operating System the built in defragmenter program will work just fine. (Read the warning at the top of this page!)

Depending on the size of the drive and how fragmented it is will determine how long it will take to combine all of your files.

Before you start the defragment program you should go to the temp folders and delete all the files there, they are useless unless you have a program open and there is a file in the temp folder for the application to use until you save it.

If you are getting the "Disk Cleanup" warning you need to delete the temp files before you defrag your hard drive. (search for "temp" folders, delete all contents.)

You should run the program in the 'Safe Mode', restart your system, press F6 or F8 when the Windows startup screen is displayed, select 'Safe Mode' from the menu.

You should run your anti-virus and anti-spyware programs before doing the defragment. Empty the temp files!

To start the Hard Drive Defragment go to Start/Programs/Accessories/System tools..

(Note: To get the best defragment close all programs, email, word doc processor, all of them. You may want to run the program after your business day and let it run over night, some times on a really fragmented drive it will take a couple of hours or more to complete the task)

Once it is started select the volume in the top window, then right click and run the analyze volume. Once the analysis is complete then let the program defrag the volume. You should see a performance boost when you have completed the defrag.

Note: The blocks of red, these are fragmented files, the green block represents unmovable system files, the blue blocks represent files that are not fragmented.

Tip: You should run the Hard Drive Defragment periodically this will preclude performance problems from the file system.

About the time it takes to defragment a drive:

When you run defrag on a system the time for competition depends on:

a) How big the drive is, the bigger the drive the longer it will take
b) How fragmented the drive is, if the drive is highly fragmented it will take a long time.
c) How many open programs you have, open programs will delay the completion of the process. (see note above!)

If you have a drive larger than 750 gig and has not been defragged before or it has been a long time since defragging it the process will take a long time, I have seen it run over 24 hours on larger drives.

As drives approach 6 Tetra Bytes (TB) in capacity it is extremely important to do a Hard Drive Defragment on a schedule, once the drive or partition is fragmented it will take a very long time to combine all the files making the access to those files faster.