Is it safe to defrag my computer pro#
Is it safe to defrag my computer Pc#
Is it safe to defrag my computer windows#

If your operating system allows it, you might want to create a defragging schedule to help you run regular basic maintenance on your computer. Run a quick systems scan and follow the instructions - the scan tool will tell you whether or not your hard drive needs defragging.

Is it safe to defrag my computer windows#

Windows users can simply use the built-in desk defragmenter utility on their machine. If you're regularly loading, saving and adding to files and documents on a daily basis, your computer may need more frequent defragging than someone who only uses their computer a few times a week.ДЇor most normal computers, a monthly defrag of the hard drive should be fine. How often should you defrag your computer? This comes down to how often you use your machine.

Is it safe to defrag my computer pro#

Pro Tip: IвЂ™ve been writing about computer basics forever.Don't leave it too long to defrag your computer (Image credit: Shutterstock) How often should you defrag your hard drive? But youвЂ™ll just be mostly wasting your time with that rather tedious process. If youвЂ™re paranoid and skeptical both, you can always get a spare physical drive, copy the entire SSDвЂ™s contents onto it, reformat the SSD and copy everything back. Suffice to say, you can ignore the problem with your solid state drive.

Is it safe to defrag my computer Pc#

There are, of course, programs you can purchase that purport to speed up SSD drives by defragmenting them, but PC World found that none of the four they tested did much of anything in real world trials. ThereвЂ™s also something called TRIM in modern operating systems that let them work more efficiently with SSD drives: TRIM вЂњallows an operating system to inform a solid-state drive (SSD) which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internallyвЂќ. In this world block351 -> block71314 -> block11 is exactly as fast to access as block1 -> block2 -> block3.Д®rgo, no need to defrag because your files canвЂ™t become fragmented. Which means thereвЂ™s no physical вЂњreadвЂќ process and the drive never has to wait to get the read head from one point on the disk to another. Instead of imagining a physical magnetic disk spinning at a super fast rate, these are more like a ton of RAM memory chips jammed into a tiny box. Which brings us to solid state drives or SSDs.

Then the old highly fragmented version is deleted, everything looks 100% identical to you on the drive, but itвЂ™s faster. It does this neat trick by copying the file into a new big block that has lots of adjacent blocks. To solve that problem on a standard drive, there are defragmentation or just defrag utilities that will find the most fragmented files on your system and fix them. With a physical drive, this can become inefficient and slow as the drive keeps waiting and waiting for the next block in a file to be available to read. Pretty soon that neat block1 -> block2 -> block3 sequence becomes far more convoluted, and block351 -> block71314 -> block11 becomes the order of the day. As you use the disk more, however, files are created, chained, deleted, resized, expanded, contracted, copied, etc. With a brand new hard drive, these blocks are contiguous to maximize performance with a physical hard drive, thereвЂ™s a read head that has to wait until the correct spot on the drive platter is available to read the contents. Each block typically includes the address of the next block in the chain, so you can see where if any link gets corrupted, the entire file is all borked up. To store a 1MB file with 2KB blocks or fragments therefore requires a chain of around 500 blocks. FAT32 on Windows, for example, uses file blocks called вЂњfragmentsвЂќ that are somewhere between 2 KBВ and 32 KB in size. To start, fragmentation occurs because every file on your computer system is actually a linked chain of вЂњblocksвЂќ, typically 1K bytes to 2K bytes.

But letвЂ™s dig into this so you understand why this is the case. The short answer is no, you donвЂ™t need to do anything to defragment your solid-state hard drives on your computer, whether youвЂ™re running Windows, Linux or MacOS X.