When we talk about defragmentation, we are referring to the process by which the files are ordered for all of them to be stored continuously, as just as possible, so that they can be accessed as quickly as possible, thus improving performance and system speed.
Currently defragmenting your hard drive it’s not so important anymore like in the past. For example, in the days of Windows XP, it was a recommended process since it achieved higher performance, especially when using large files, to the computer all the fragments of the disk continuously.
Defragment a mechanical hard drive
Since Windows 10 was released, this basic maintenance task is performed automatically and continuously by Microsoft’s own operating system. Even so, the option to force explicit defragmentation of a disk drive is still available on the system, so there are cases that may be recommended for certain situations. We can access it by typing defragment in the search box of the Start menu.
In the event that we have a mechanical hard drive, we can use it when we have the partitioned disk, so that we have the system unit in one and the other with stored data. It may also be advisable to do it when we have external storage drives that we use frequently by deleting and adding files since they will tend to fragment more quickly. In addition, in case we use an older operating system such as Windows 7, we should also consider defragmentation as a method to improve the performance of the computer.
With SSD disks we should never defragment
For some years now, SSD disks have become an element that has begun to form part of our computer, taking advantage of its great advantages, since its performance and speed is much higher than that of mechanical hard disks. These discs are specially used to install and run the operating system, applications and games, in order to obtain a higher performance.
These discs, unlike the mechanics, have practically instantaneous access to data as they do not have a head that has to move to each part of the file and read it sequentially. Thanks to this, fragmentation is not a problem on SSD drives, so we should not use defragmentation.
SSD disks have a useful life based on the number of writes, so if we perform defragmentation tasks on them we will only achieve a drastic loss of their useful life. In addition, in the SSD the existing files can be replaced by others automatically and enter any information that we need to save there, so the defragmentation function lacks any sense in them.
