Optomize Your Hard Drive With Smart Defrag

Defragging your hard drive can give your PC a boost in performance by reorganizing the data in a more efficient way. Defragging also increases the longevity of your hard drive by reducing the amount of physical movements the drive performs and lowering its degradation.

What Does Defragging Do?

When your computer writes data to its hard drive, it finds any free space and writes the data randomly where ever it can fit. Over time, the files become fragmented on the drive which means the read/write head has to physically cover more “ground” to fetch the data as it is spread all over the disk. It’s a bit like an old vinyl record where instead of a song being one continuous groove, parts of the song are randomly spread across the record.

Windows Vs. Smart Defrag

Windows has had a defragmenting tool included since Windows 95 but it’s only recently that Microsoft have included Disk Defragmenter that you are able to be schedule to run once a week for example. Even so, I tend to recommend to people to use Smart Defrag and here is why.
• It is much faster then it’s Windows equivalent.
• It truly is automatic (not just scheduled) and only defrags your hard drive when your PC is idle.
• It also defrags you PC’s boot time for faster system boots.
• And best of all – Its FREE!

Using Smart Defrag

This truly is a set and forget program and very easy to use. On first run you will be confronted with the programs main window. I always select “Defrag and Fully Optimise” option from the Defrag button and let it do its thing. Smart Defrag will not only defrag your hard drive, it will compact all the most frequently used data to the start of the drive for increased performance.

The next step is to make sure Smart Defrag is setup to run automatically in the background. Do this by clicking on the Automatic Defrag tab. By default, this is turned on but it’s worth just double checking just in case.

And last but not least, click on the Boot Time Defrag tab. This setting in switched off by default so go ahead and activate by clicking on the Turn on button. You can change the setting if you want, but I find the recommended configuration of a boot scan every 7 days fine.

Defragging your Windows PC is highly recommended and becomes even easier using Smart Defrag, as once you have completed the initial setup, it happily runs in the background and you need never need worry about defragging again.by michael rothwell