How to Improve Performance by Defragmenting Your Hard Disk

Does disk defragmenter improve performance?

Defragmenting your computer indeed helps arrange the data on your hard drive and can significantly enhance its performance, particularly in terms of speed. But, how does defragmentation improve the performance of hard drives? Here, we’ll do a brief interpretation.

Disk fragmentation happens when files or parts of files become dispersed throughout your drives. If the disk is significantly fragmented, there will be insufficient contiguous space to hold further files, thus the file will be split up and stored in several locations on the drive. This results in disk fragmentation, which reduces overall system performance.

The most effective method is to run a disk defrag. It will restructure the data on the disk partitions such that the files are stored in as much contiguous space as feasible. Then the files may be kept in a continuous piece rather than being dispersed over several locations on the hard drive's partition. Due to the reorganization of the files, the hard drive can find the asked data and files easier and faster, the performance of HDD is improved.

Improve performance by defragmenting your hard disk

As you know the working principle about how can defragmentation improve the disk performance, now, let’s move on to see how to improve hard disk performance by defragmenting.

In this part, we’ll use the Windows tool and a third-party defragmenter to show the detailed steps.

Method 1. Use Defragment and Optimise Drives

Windows has an application which is called “Defragment and Optimise Drives”. All Windows users can use it. In this section, we’ll use Windows 11 as an example.

Step 1. In the Start menu's search bar, type “defragment”, then click “Defragment and Optimise Drives”. Then a window will open where you can see a list of your computer's various disk drives.

Step 3. Select the disk drive you want to optimize and click on “Optimise”. Then it will start analyzing the fragments and reorganizing them.

The “Change Setting” button at the bottom of the window-” Optimise Drives” section allows the user to set to automatically defrag. If you need it, you can set it. In Windows tool, it provides three different plans of frequency: daily, weekly and monthly. Choose one based on your requirements, click on “OK” to commit the changes.

Method 2. Use professional defragmenter

If the schedule option does not match your demands, for example, you want to conduct the disk defrag at a specified time every day, at every startup, at every login, and so on, you can use AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Also, you can set the exact rate of fragmentation and the battery condition, using habits to do a great DIY of your schedule. It includes a disk partition defrag, which allows you to configure the automated disk defrag time with the greatest degree of freedom.

Tip: It has Server edition (supports Windows Server 2022/2019/2016/2012(R2)/2008(R2)) for Server users to defrag their hard drives. 

Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Right-click the drive you want to defrag and choose “Disk Defrag”. 

Step 2. Then the Disk Defrag window will open. You can tick the target drive and click on “Schedule” to enter the “Schedule Setting” window.

Step 3. Tick the “Defrag” and you can choose from the given options such as frequency, date, time, etc.

Step 4. You can define the conditions in which you want to start the automatic disk defrag. Just click on “Conditions”.

Further knowledge: How to optimize SSD

After the defragment, your hard drive might perform better. But if you also have an SSD on your PC, how do you optimize the SSD easily?

Well, firstly, we need to tell you that never defrag your SSD. SSD records data in different ways from HDD. The SSD's search time is nearly zero. Theoretically, the seek time will not change because it is determined by the technology of the main control chip and flash memory particles. What point affects the performance of an SSD is the time of erasing and writing. The number of the time is limited, while defragment will increase the erasing times of SSD, so it even shortens the lifespan.

For the optimization of SSD, there’s a Trim feature you can employ. 

Step 1. Press “Windows” + “R” and type CMD to open it.

Step 2. Type: “fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify” to check the Trim feature is on or off.

DisableDeleteNotify = 0 : TRIM is already available and working in Windows

DisableDeleteNotify = 1 : TRIM is not available

Step 3. If it’s not available, please type: "fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify" and press “Enter” to enable Trim.

And you can use AOMEI Partition Assistant to do a 4k alignment to decrease the split data. And if you need to erase an SSD, don't do it as it's an HDD because the intensively reading/writing data on SSD will reduce its performance. To safely erase your SSD for a fresh start or restore SSD to factory state, you can use the "SSD secure erase" feature.

Secure Erase is a function for SSDs (solid-state drives) that ensures all data contained on the SSD storage device is entirely wiped before the SSD returns to its previous optimal performance level.

Bonus tips

You now understand how to enhance performance by defragmenting your hard disk after reading the preceding text. The AOMEI Partition Assistant is a great option if you want to perform it with the most convenience and flexibility. Aside from (schedule) disk/partition defrag, it also includes many other features to help manage disk partitions, such as migration of the operating system to SSD, moving installed programs, cloning the hard drive, converting MBR to GPT without deleting partitions, allocating free space from one partition to another, and so on.