How to Defragment a Hard Drive

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Ross. Thanks for coming to expertvillage.com, let’s begin. How do you defragment your hard drive? Let’s open up windows explorer and do the windows key on the keyboard, and then press the E button. This brings up my view on the left of some different devices. I have my hard drive here, the local drive. I’m going to press the plus sign and it will open up the folders there. I’m not really concerned about the folders in this case. What I actually want to view is the properties of the local disc, the C drive. That’s the hard drive on this system. I’m going to right click it, bring up the contact sensitive menu, and going down the properties and selecting it with the left button. This is how much free space I have here and used space. Go over to tools, it’s the second tab at the top, defragmentation. Click defragment now; hit analyze. You’ll see a compute, I’m going to hit close. If do view report, it’ll give me a detailed text report. I’m going to close, waiting for this image to show up. The red, according to the legend, is the fragmented files and contiguous files is in the blue. We really want to have contiguous files. The fragmented files means that you have to jump around more to read your data. When the hard drive is spinning, if your file is contiguous, the head will just move along; stepping and picking up the next piece of data. So, you actually have quicker data transfer. I can yet defragment and it’ll actually start moving the data around on the hard drive. It will position the files that are supposed to be together in order so that they will be contiguous. That’s how you defragment your hard drive."