How To Defragment Your Hard Disk in Windows 10 and 11 So, if you have an old or external HDD, it’s always a good idea to defragment it yourself for a smoother performance. However, it only works for drives that are physically connected to your motherboard.

These days Windows automatically defrags mechanical hard drives. The process of reversing this breakdown and reorganizing the data on the hard drive is called defragmentation. This is another reason why hard drive-based computers tend to slow down when your storage is almost full. This slows down the overall reading speed of that hard drive. The issue here is that whenever data fragments are stored farther away from each other, it takes a while for your computer to recollect it all before it can be presented to you again. Even though it seems efficient that those empty spaces are finally being used, that’s not the case. This results in data being scattered all across the hard drive. Now, during the process of storing more data, the hard drive fills up the empty coaches with some fragments of data and creates new coaches for the remaining pieces. As a hard drive reads and writes data, more such spaces are created over time. However, whenever you delete a file, the coach containing that particular file is emptied but not removed from the train completely, which creates an empty space. These coaches are added in a sequential manner. Every time you add more data to your hard drive, it’s broken down into smaller pieces or fragments, and a new coach is added to the train to store that data. Think of the latter as a train where the coaches store and carry data. To understand what defragmentation is, you need to know how a hard drive works.

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