What percent fragmentation should I defrag?Īs a general rule, any time your disk is more than 10 percent fragmented, you should defrag it. To determine if the disk needs to be defragmented, click Analyze disk.Under Current status, select the disk to defragment.In the search box, type Disk Defragmenter. Open Disk Defragmenter by clicking the Start button.9 How do I optimize my external hard drive?.
I may go a couple weeks or longer - only booting when a Windows Update requires it. That said, many of us rarely boot our systems. As for the OS itself, yes, Windows Updates typically installs several new files and deletes old files, but that's not every day. But most users are not constantly installing new programs or modifying their existing documents. If you are constantly (like every day) downloading and installing new programs, uninstalling old programs, modifying lots of personal documents files and more, then maybe this would be beneficial.
And it would only occur to those new or modified files (not to existing files that are not modified) - in particular when running low on free space. I think enough has been said.Ĭlick to expand.Why? This just is not necessary, can increase boot times, and certainly adds unnecessary wear on the drive.įragmentation occurs when new or modified files are saved to the disk. But it will not actually defrag the files, as it would on a HD.Īs this point, a 1/2 dozen people have told you your drives are being properly optimized by Windows by default. You can certainly tell Optimize Disk to manually optimize the SSD. If a SSD, the system reports that information to the operating system, which then enables and disables certain features and tasks, depending on the type of drive. At the hardware level, when the BIOS detects a drive, the drive itself tells the system if it is an hard drive or a SSD (or CD/DVD, etc.). So if starting to get down near 30GB, I recommend you start looking at ways to free up space, or start shopping around for a bigger drive.Īs for people telling you to defrag a SSD, you can not manually defrag a SSD. Just remember that modern SSD makers build in "over-provisioning" space just for SSD maintenance/optimization tasks. More is better, however - especially with a SSD. And that seems to be plenty on SSDs for wear leveling and TRIM operations. But I have found leaving at least 30GB free seems to be plenty for temp files, the dynamic Page File, and defragging of hard drive. On a 4TB that would be wasting over 1TB of valuable disk space!
On a 1TB drive (which is almost small these days), that would be 300GB! Windows does not need 300GB of free disk space. You will often see something like 30% of the disk. The OS, Word, and your favorite game takes up the same amount space regardless if you have a 100GB drive, or a 4TB drive. Operating systems care about actual numbers, not percentages. So how much free disk space is enough? Don't listen to anyone who says you need a certain percentage.
So all you need to do as a user to make sure your boot drive remains "optimized" is to make sure you leave plenty of free disk space for Windows to operate freely in. If you disabled it, unless you have serious black-out periods during which you remain highly functional (I'm talking serious split-personality disorders), disabling it is something you would remember. As mentioned, you know if it is working by looking at when it was last done.Īs for it being on or off, did you manually disable it? This not something you can accidentally disable by accidentally clicking some button.