How long does it take to defrag a hard drive?
Asked by
PhiNotPi (
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August 27th, 2011
I have a windows Vista computer with a 231 GB hard drive with 21 GB free. It has not been defragmented since around three years ago. It has been in large use since then (lots of stuff that may fragment a computer such as file editing). How long should it take to defrag the hard drive?
I am only asking since it has been defragging for the past five hours and is still going.
My computer also has the option to defrag on a schedule. How often should I set it to be defragged?
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7 Answers
It will definitely take quite a while, I would maybe defrag once every few months.
Also, you want to keep at least 20% of your hard drive free, if you can’t copy to an external. that means you should have over 50 gigs free for top performance, and keep stuff like movies or pictures on an external, stuff you dont use 24/7
It can take many hours depending on how fragmented it is, I have mine set to defrag at 300am every Sunday. and it stays in good shape and never takes more that 5 minutes
@DrBill True, if you have a desktop that you leave running all the time thent ahts good, but my laptop is my main computer, and i dont always have the time.
When the drive is more than 90% consumed (used) then defragging is going to take awhile. Consider offloading some of the files that you don’t use often, onto an external USB drive, or simply replacing the current drive with a new higher-capacity one.
I use ccleaner in conjunction with an open source defragger on a schedule.
Normal computer work is like moving into a new apartment. When you first get there you just stuff all your things into rooms wherever it can fit so you can return the uhaul truck.
Defragging is the part where you divide things into the proper rooms and place them neatly where they belong. If you have a tiny apartment but loads of belongings, it’s hard to move things around.
If you have a large apartment and fewer belongings you have room to maneuver.
In your case you either need a larger apartment, or to get rid of some of your “belongings”, then set a defragger on a schedule that works for you. There are a few open source defraggers out there that can do the trick for free and more efficiently than the windows default defragger.
@all Thank you for the advice, I am going to start to clean up my hard drive now. The first thing I spotted was a Visual Studio disk image (3 GB) that I thought I got rid of a long time ago.
That is why I defrag at least once a week. If I let it go much longer, it may take a while. Many of the PCs I repair have never been defragged, so it often takes all night!
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