Windows 10: How often should I defragment my hard drive?

Defragmenting files is just one part of maintaining peak disk performance. Another important part is free space consolidation. Consolidating free space ensures that new files will be created quickly and contiguously - ensuring that peak performance is realized from the beginning. Free space consolidation also results in a faster performing drive - much faster than simply defragmenting files.

To perform free space consolidation on the specified volumes execute following command.

Code: Defrag C: /X /H[/quote]

 

Bill Gates hasn't had much to do with Microsoft since 2006.

 

MTBF is actually Mean Time Between Failures .

 

My vote is just let Windows defrag in the background and not be concerned about it.

As far as file fragmentation on an SSD - completely a non-issue as an SSD has no mechanical read/write head that has to move around to pick up the file fragments. It can be 99% fragmented and have no bearing whatsoever on performance.

 

I have routinely defragmented drives since the days of Windows 95. It used to provide significant speed advantages back then, these days the improvements to be gained I find are still there, but very much smaller. My guess is that this is down to modern HDDs being better at random access than their older counterparts.

If you want to experiment, you'll need a way to create fragmentation. One of the best ways I've found to seriously fragment a drive is to apply ntfs compression, this can result in more than 25% fragmentation. Uncompressing it again leave this fragmentation in place.

 

I haven't de-fragmented my HDDs in ages, ever since start of W7 and amount of fragmentation is very minimal. Windows show 0% while programs like "o&o" and "Disk speedup" show only few percent, nothing that could even remotely slow them down. Two HDDs (2Tb and 1TB) that are constantly connected, go thru large amount of data every day due to my habit of hoarding SW, trying it and discarding most of them. Ones slated for keeping, I archive as much as possible and backup most of them to external HDDs.
There are many arguments for and against defraging but I go by these reasons:

Every full defrag with optimization make a HDD work as much as few months of normal use and that can shorten it's life because of much head movement and in realty limited number of changes to ferromagnetic particles.

Doesn't really help unless amount of fragmentation is very large. Even with XP it's considered that less than 17 - 20% makes no difference and only approaching 33% can be felt by benchmarks and 50% by naked eye.

Some programs, including data bases and MS Office intentionally leave spaces after data files empty to enlarge them in continuous fashion and so speed up the process.

Modern HDDs are so much faster than at times it was necessary to defragment them often. Not even "Short stroking" helps to any extent any more.