Of course, you can continue to use your computer when the process is running, but it is recommended to avoid copying or to move files as it will only make the process much longer. The time can be from several minutes to several hours to finish. The time varies from one computer to another since each has its box. If the drive is larger, the longer it will take If their are more files stored, the longer it will be for the computer to defragment all of them. How many passes does it take to Defragment?ĭefragmentation depends on the hardware being used. Disk defragmentation attempts to eliminate this extra time. It will effectively increase the access time to the file. The main head would have to change its location repeatedly to read a file. Now imagine if your computer's disk had files saved with many spaces in between. The head should traverse the disk to that location and read the data. Direct your head to a specific location and access the data stored there.

The operating system has a map of all files and is saved. It makes the recovery of files much faster.Ī hard drive consists of a head from which it reads data. Defragmenting the disk is removing all random free spaces, then collecting all the files and storing them in contiguous blocks of memory.

Defragging windows 10