How to Defrag Windows 11?

Defragmenting your hard drive is an important part of maintaining your Windows 11 computer’s performance. When we delete certain files on our computer, spaces are created in the disks. So, while installing new documents, these items are stored as fragments. This can slow down your computer and make it run less effectively. To deal with them, we need defragmentation.

To defrag in Windows 11, we do not require a third-party tool as it can be done from the in-built features. This section covers the basic techniques anyone can use to optimize their hard drives.

Disk Optimization on Windows Interface

There’s a special tool available on the Windows interface that lets you optimize your disk drives. You can follow these two simple steps to defrag in Windows 11:

Open Disk Fragmentation Tool

Well, there are three methods to open Disk Fragmentation tools. The first one is from system Settings:

1. On your Settings window, select System and visit Storage.
   
2. Scroll down and choose Advanced storage settings.
3. Now, choose Drive optimization. This will take you to a dialogue box that helps optimize your drives.
   

Another method to open the Disk Fragmentation tool is from a preferred drive’s properties. Here’s how to do it:

1. Navigate to the drive you wish to defrag.
2. Right-click on it and choose Properties.
   
3. Finally, select the Tools tab and click on the Optimize button. Well, this opens the same window you accessed earlier from Settings.
   

Alternatively, you can open the dialogue box from the Start Menu. To do so, simply search for Defragmenter or a relative keyword. Then, open the Defragment and Optimize Drives application.

Optimize Your Disk Drives

After successfully launching the defragmenter tool, you can now easily optimize your preferred hard disks. Follow this guide to defrag your hard drive:

1. Firstly, select a drive or multiple drives in the Status window. Interestingly, you can even select the Advanced option to choose other drives from your PC.
   
2. If you select only one drive, click on Optimize. If you choose multiple disks, press Optimize all. 
3. Now, wait for a few moments. This depends on the hard drive you’re using and the number of files that needs to get optimized. Once done, click on Close.

Well, there’s an option that lets you check whether your disk needs defragmentation or not. To do so, choose the Analyze option. However, this feature remains disabled by default if your drive doesn’t require optimization.

Disk Defragmentation on Command Prompt

Very few of us know that we can defrag using Command Prompt too. Follow these general commands to optimize your hard drives:

1. At first, launch Command Prompt from Start Menu or Run.
2. Then, type defrag [Your Drive Name]: and hit enter. This will take a few minutes to perform defragmentation. Once completed, you will receive both pre-optimization and post-optimization reports.
   
3. If you want to perform other actions, try defrag /? to view all the commands you can use. For example, typing defrag C: /a will invoke analysis on your C drive.

Create a Batch File to Defrag Your Hard Drive

Another technique to defrag an HDD is creating a batch file with a .bat extension. Go through the following steps to learn how to do it:

1. Firstly, open Notepad.
2. Now, copy and paste the code provided below:
   @echo off defrag.exe c: -f
3. If you want to defrag multiple drives, simply use this code after the above one.
   defrag.exe [your drive name]: -f
   
4. Once done, save the file in .bat format.
   
5. Now, launch the program you just created.
   
6. Then, wait for several minutes until disk defragmentation is completed on your PC. Once done, the process will close automatically.

Does Degramentation Help to Free Up Disk Space?

The defragmentation process is only for rearrangement of the unordered files or programs. So, it has nothing to do with disk space. Therefore, it’s safe to say that defragmentation doesn’t free up disk space.

But if you are looking for ways to free up your disk space, you can refer to this article.

How Can I Schedule Defragmentation on Windows?

Generally, Windows recommends you defrag your drives weekly. Nonetheless, you can change this setting from the defragmenter tool itself. 

Here’s how you can schedule defragmentation on Windows so that you do not need to do it yourself:

1. Open the Defragmenter tool from the methods we explained above.
2. Under Scheduled Optimization, select Change Settings.
   
3. Now, set the frequency to Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. Also, you can choose the drives you want to defrag automatically.
4. Finally, press Ok to make the desired changes.