
If you have tried “Defragment and Optimize Drives”, you may find that you cannot run the operation on multiple drives at the same time. Insert “defrag x:” (x is the name letter of your external hard drive.) and hit “Enter”.ģ. Press “Windows” + “R” to open the “Run” box, then type “cmd” to open CMD. Click “Optimize” to defragment the selected drive. You can choose according to the “Current status” column. In the Status box, you can see all readable drives that are allowed to optimize and defragment. Then the “Optimize Drives” window will appear. And click the best match “Defragment and Optimize Drives” to open it. Use Defragment and Optimize Drives to defragįirst, you need to connect your external hard disk to your computer and ensure it plug steadily. This part will show you how to use the “Defragment and Optimize Drives” app and CMD from Windows itself to defragment your external hard disk and recommend you an external hard drive defrag software to defragment drives with a better experience. Normally, there are 3 ways to defragment your hard disk. Guide-How to defragment external hard disk If you want to use an external hard drive with a 3.0 interface as a work drive not a backup drive to store files, you still need to keep it in nice maintains. Though the theoretical maximum transmission speed of USB 3.0 is 5Gbps (about 625MB/s), nearly 10 times faster than USB2.0. The disk defragmentation is a specific solution to these scattered files.īy using Windows tool or professional hard drive or external hard drive defrag software, the process of rearranging the fragments of the disk, thereby increasing the operating speed of the computer. The more frequent the file deletion, the more fragments. The large files you downloaded will be divided into several small files and stored on the hard disk. The virtual memory management program frequently reads and writes on the hard disk, which can result in a lot of fragments. The hard disk space will be occupied by these files that have been virtualized into memory. Generally, the OS will generate temporary swap files on the hard disk. If a program wants to read the files again, the relevant component must go to a different storage place to read, which is why your computer gets slower than before. When the HDD is used for a long time, the files will be scattered to discontinuous positions in the disk. After a brief reading about the working details of your external HDD, you can select the appropriate solution according to your situation.

Should I defragment my external hard drive? May that hurt my external hard drive? In this part, we’ll explain how HDD works, where fragments come from, and how defragmentation performs to improve the hard drive performance.
