So there's a good chance you don't actually have to do anything! Here's the good news: unlike the old days of Windows XP, which required you to manually defrag your hard drive once in a while, Windows 7, 8, and 10 defrags your computer automatically on a schedule.

You can see a visual representation of this in the GIF above, from Wikimedia user XZise. That means the drive's head has to navigate to multiple places in order to read the file, thus slowing things down.ĭefragmenting your drive reassembles those files and combines your free space back into one block, making reading and writing faster. If you delete some data, the drive will go back and fill those blocks when you write new data-sometimes leading to files getting split apart and stored on two (or more) different sections of the platter. Traditional hard drives (sometimes known as HDDs) use spinning platters to store data in sequential 'blocks' across each platter.

Here's how it works, and what you need to know. Defragmenting (or 'defragging') is one of the most commonly recommended tasks in this area, alongside uninstalling programs, checking your PC's memory, and running a virus scan. If your computer's feeling slow, it might be time to do a little maintenance.

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