How To Defragment a Windows 10 Hard Drive
If you know you have an HDD type of drive, you can move forward with defragging. First, you’ll need to see how badly fragmented it is.
Automatically Optimize Your Drive
Instead of trying to remember to do this entire process manually on a regular schedule, you can configure Windows 10 to do it automatically.
How To Tell if You Have an SSD or HDD
Many Windows 10 computers still come with a Hard Disk Drive (HDD), a mechanical, magnetic disk that stores and retrieves digital data. If your Windows computer has an HDD, then you’ll want to defrag the device from time to time. If it has a Solid State Drive (SSD), then you shouldn’t defragment it all. Now your Windows 10 PC will automatically defragment your hard drive regularly, so you never have to worry about remembering to do it yourself.
HDD vs. SSD
A hard disk drive retrieves information by moving a mechanical arm across the disk. If the information it retrieves is fragmented around different parts of the disk, this requires a lot of extra movement and a longer time to retrieve the data (that is, the computer can feel slower than when you first got it). By contrast, fragmentation on a solid-state drive really won’t ever feel any slower because it reads data electronically from each memory storage location without moving parts, so it doesn’t matter if the data is fragmented. Also, defragging an SSD actually applies excessive use to the drive. And since SSD memory cells degrade every time you read or write data to it, defragging needlessly consumes the life span of that drive.
