How to Defragment a Hard Drive

Written: 2009/08/23

This article is just a quick guide on how to defragment a hard drive. To learn more about fragmentation read my article about how hard drives work, the process is explained there. Click here to read that article. If you already know what fragmentation is, and want to know how to fix it, read on.

Assuming you have windows XP, go to the start menu (or desktop if the icon is there) and right click on "my computer" and select "manage". On the left you will see a tree navigation system, under "storage" click "disk management". Look for the drive or partition you want to defragment. Make sure it has about 10% free space, since to defragment, the system will move files around so that their physical locations on disk are continuous and not broken up. If you have no free space, or too little of it, it will not be able to do this efficiently.

Assuming you have enough free space, I suggest you consider two things before defragmenting: go through your files and see if there's anything you want to delete, particularly large files or large groups of small files (i.e: pictures you already have stored somewhere else). Once you have done that, run the disk cleanup utility, start > run > "cleanmgr.exe". Select the appropriate drive letter, select all the options that would effectively clear some space, and run it.

Once that is done, move on to the defragmenting. In the tree navigation from earlier, click "disk defragmenter", which is right above disk management.

Select the appropriate drive letter from the list, and click "analyze" at the bottom. If the image shows a lot of blue and white, this is a good thing. However every bit of red is representing some fragmentation, if it looks like there's a lot of red, you should go ahead with the defrag.

This image above would be considered alright and not need a defrag right away, but if you have the time to spare go for it anyways.

Once you're ready to go (highly suggested to have as little possible, or no activity on the physical disk in question) click the defragment button, and let it work. It can take quite some time if the drive has a lot of data on it, especially if there was a lot of red sections on your analasis.

The image bellow shows the disk from the previous image after the defragmenting process:


A last word of advice, the default windows defragmenting utility sucks. I use it because i don't mind it being slow, i do my defrags overnight or when i'm gone out. There are some tools out there that will do the job much faster, however finding free ones that are good and won't mess up your data is something you'll have to do on your own. Maybe Google can help you.