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Yes. A hard drive. Not an SSD. NTFS.

As far as I know and see on the web - HDDs should be defragmented. That's why Windows NT does it in the background all the time. (Well, not really, since my computer is either in use or off.)

But apparently according to a user with high rep here:

There are tons of articles showing that defragging is no longer necessary.

I searched but couldn't find those articles. Not only that. I found many articles claiming the opposite. So, could someone please explain this? Perhaps, as with many other things, the answer is "it depends" - so what does it depend on?

Keep in mind that my question is not if there's a need for a 3rd party defragmenter, or if there's a need for scheduling a defrag, etc. My question is: On a Windows 10 system that is hardly ever idle, where all drives are the default NTFS, is there a need to use Windows' defragmenter?

Community
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ispiro
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3 Answers3

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As I often say, the guys who wrote the OS are pretty smart and know better. Usually (the initial releases of NTFS did not have a first party defragmenter, and they later found it was needed) . While this article is a decade old, NTFS is NTFS, and many of what it says is probably fundamentally still true. NTFS is designed to minimise defragmentation but eliminating it without some online, in process defragmentation process is hard.

Windows dosen't constantly defragment your hard disk. It periodically checks and does defragmentation if needed. And windows tries its best to keep files compacted as they're created - fragmentation happens when files are modified.

So, the scheduled, or even manual defragentation process is a preventive maintenance check. Its a little like checking your oil. You can pull out your dipstick and check, have some fancy thing that checks it for you (so cars have that?) and most of the time you should be fine. If it isn't, you'd have trouble and wished you checked.

As such, I'd leave the defaults as is. Manual defragmentation runs are probably no longer needed on 7 and better - since the system runs an automatic check every week by default, and defragments as needed.

Journeyman Geek
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The answer depends on the layout of the filesystem.

In the past we used FAT16 and later FAT32 which was later upgraded to ExFAT.

These filesystems store files in a linear order and when a file is removed, empty space is filled where previously was data. This causes for fragmentation and in these cases fragmenting a harddisk will help.

Because a harddisk that is fragmented becomes slower, developers wanted to find a way to get around the issue. NTFS fileystem was made which stores files differently. Due to how the files are stored, fragmentation is less likely to occur and for that reason you will likely not need to defragment the drive.

In addition, windows does defragment the drive on its own.

Windows 10 requires NTFS so the answer is: No, the user does not have to perform additional defragmentation.

That said, SSD's have their own defragmentation problems regardless of their filesystem.

LPChip
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Defragmentation is not needed if you don't mind slow computer. Some filesystems needed to be deferagmented more often than others. Probability of fragments creation in partition which is nearly full is higher than in empty partition. This rule is filesystem independent.

I guess that defragmentation is sometimes needed to improve performance.

Jirka Picek
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