Do you really need a 3rd-party disk defragmenter?

By | March 26, 2013

Once upon a time, Windows Disk Defragmenter was not very good and not very fast. And even in Windows XP, while vastly improved, it’s still not as good as it should be. And considering that there are some techies who think with modern hard drives, defragging isn’t necessary at all. And SSDs — Solid State Drives never need defragging at all.

We have noticed, during Cloudeight Direct Computer Repair sessions that many of you running Windows 7 have 3rd-party disk defragmentation programs installed, and these almost always start with Windows, either as a program or as a service – or both. But 3rd-party programs aren’t needed in Windows 7 or Windows 8, because both automatically defragment your hard drives. Windows 7 and Windows 8, by default, set up a schedule to defrag the hard drives automatically. Of course, you can, If you wish, manually modify the schedule by opening Disk Defragmenter (type defrag in the search box in the start menu).

We find that the Disk Defragmenter always shows 0% for all our drives and to us this means that Windows is doing a good job of keeping our drives defragmented.

In short on our Windows 7 and Windows 8 computers, we don’t worry about disk defragmentation, we just let Windows handle it in the background and we’ve found it works well. When you install a 3rd-party defragmenter, it’s almost always going to start with Windows and use resources unnecessarily. If you don’t need it, why have it?

Let Windows 7 and Windows 8 handle your hard drive defragmentation — that’s what we say.

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