Select the drive you’d like to defragment in the list, then click “Optimize.”

Drives formatted as exFAT will not appear in the list. If one of your drives doesn’t show up, it may be because Windows 10 can only optimize drives formatted in the NTFS filesystem. The Optimize Drives window will appear, and it will list all of the drives in your system that are eligible for optimization and defragmentation. RELATED: Do I Really Need to Defrag My PC? How to Defragment Your Hard Disk on Windows 10įirst, press the Windows key or click the search box on your taskbar and type “defragment.” Click the “Defragment and Optimize Your Drives” shortcut in the Start menu. You might also need to defragment external hard disk drives connected via USB, as they may not be plugged in when Windows runs its automatic defragmentation. Still, it doesn’t hurt to keep your drives operating in the most efficient way possible. Windows automatically defragments mechanical drives, and defragmentation isn’t necessary with solid-state drives. However, with modern computers, defragmentation isn’t the necessity it once was. Defragmenting moves all of those blocks so they are located close together in physical space, which potentially speeds up read times when accessing data on the disk. Over time, the data blocks (fragments) that make up files can become scattered in multiple locations around the surface of the hard disk.

Disk defrag 10