Week 6 Disk Defragging

 Week 6 Disk Defragmenting - Important Maintenance

For this post, I wanted to bring attention to an important part of computer maintenance that some people may overlook or don't even realize is happening. Maintenance, like with vehicles, is essential as it ensures everything is running properly. With modern operating systems, a lot of the maintenance processes happen automatically to make the ease of using computer systems a lot better. One prominent example of a maintenance process happening is disk defragmentation.

What is disk defragmentation? Well, disk defragmentation, simply put, is the operating system's way of making sure that files are organized in a methodical way to increase the efficiency of drives and their data. Defragmentation offers many benefits such as increased boot times, increased hard drive life span, faster application loading, and increased space. As time goes along and you make many downloads to a computer, the system slowly loses its speed and efficiency because of the amount of data that it has to process and go through. Defragging is meant to serve as a way to prevent the system from slowing. Fortunately, many modern hard drives work very proficiently so defragging isn't as important as it may have been in the past. Still, it is a good practice to defragment drives.

So you may be wondering, how exactly can I defragment my drives? Well, Windows automatically has this feature enabled for you! Windows automatically defrags your hard drive every week to ensure proper maintenance is being performed on it. Now there is one caveat, and that is that solid-state drives aren't capable of being defragged. I will spare you the details on the specifics, but the main reason is that solid-state drives operate on memory cells while hard drives operate on mechanical disks. They work in very different ways. 

There is a cool way to defragment your drives. Go to your Windows search bar and search "Defrag" or "Optimize Drives" from there, you evaluate each drive to see if you may want to defrag it. Under the analyze and optimize buttons, you will find Scheduled Optimization. If you wish the change the frequency of your hard drive being defragged, simply press "Change Settings" and adjust your preferences accordingly. I would recommend leaving it on weekly though.

If you are attempting to access the defragment software, it should look something like this: