Do I actually need to defragment my hard disk drive?

[tweeder]

For years I’ve been using the built in Windows defrag tool on a weekly basis to defragment my hard drive after some advice many years ago now I received on how to keep my PC running well. In addition I also run disk cleanup and C Cleaner regularly.

Recently a family member told me I don’t need to do this any more. Is this true? If so why do they still include the defragmenter with windows 10?

 

[strollin]

Perhaps you were told that an SSD doesn’t need to be defragmented? Actually, an SSD shouldn’t be defragged.

On a regular HDD nothing has changed, they still get fragmented so defragging is still a good idea.

 

[root]

Welcome to CF! As @strollin has said - if you have a modern solid state drive there’s no need to defrag the disk. Is it a fairly modern PC you have - do you know if it has a SSD?

As for CCleaner / disk cleanup, I’m somewhat skeptical of CCleaner these days yet years ago recommended it to friends and family - the disk cleanup tool on windows is fine if disk space is a concern, or you could use Bleachbit.

If you have got plenty of disk space to spare I wouldn’t bother running any sort of cleaning program as it won’t really make a difference to system speed.

 

[tweeder]

Thanks for the advice!

Yes, I think my laptop has a SSD, its this one and I got it quite recently
https://www.argos.co.uk/product/5029976

 

[strollin]

Your laptop definitely has an SSD. From the link you posted:

CPU, Memory and Operating System:

• Intel Core i5 1035G1 processor.*
• Quad core processor.*
• 1GHz processor speed with a burst speed of 3.6GHz.*
• 8GB RAM DDR4.*
• 256GB SSD storage.*
• Microsoft Windows 10.*

Since you have an SSD, you definitely do not want to defrag it. The software that controls the SSD purposely spreads writes to different memory cells in order not to continually reuse the same cells over and over. This is referred to as wear leveling and isn’t compatible with defragging. In fact, Windows should automatically disable defragging for a drive it detects as an SSD.