As you operate a hard drive, Windows
8 deletes files in some places and writes files in other places using
available free space on disk. Your system uses the free space
available, and when the available free space in one contiguous area on
disk isn’t large enough to fit a file, Windows will write part of the
file to one location and another part of the file to another location.
That is called file or disk fragmentation, because the file is split up
into fragments.
Fragmentation extracts a performance penalty
on your system because a disk head is forced to move locations to read
data (called a “seek”) as it performs a READ operation. For
magneto-optical hard drives, the performance penalty can be on the
order of 10 to 20 percent, which is not insignificant but not a major
penalty. Still, there are programs called “defraggers” that you can use
to move files around so that they are contiguous, as well as to place
commonly used files like system files together on disk in optimal
locations. It’s good to perform defrags on your disks every two to four
weeks. Windows 8 ships with a utility called Optimize Drives that
allows you to perform this operation.
To perform a defrag on a hard drive
1. Press 
+I and tap or click the Control Panel link that appears in the Settings bar.
2. In the Defrag control panel, enter defrag into the Search field and press Enter or tap the Find icon .
Search for the Defrag control panel to open this tool.
3. Click the Defragment and optimize your drive link to open the Optimize Drives dialog box .
The Optimize Drives dialog box
Defragmentation can take from several
minutes to several hours, depending on the size of the disk, the number
of files, and the degree of fragmentation that must be optimized.
4. To analyze a disk’s fragmentation, select the drive and tap or click the Analyze button.
5. To optimize a disk, select the drive and tap or click the Optimize button.
6. Tap or click Close when the operation is finished.
To schedule defragmentation
1. Tap or click the Change Settings button in the Schedule Optimization section of the Optimize Drives dialog box.
2. Select a frequency from the Frequency drop-down menu .
The Optimization Schedule screen
3. Click the Choose button and select the drives you wish to optimize. Tap or click the OK button.
4. Tap or click the OK button on the Optimization Schedule screen.
Tip
You can optimize all attached hard drives, as
well as certain solid-state devices. Solid-state drives also suffer
from defragmentation, but they use an alternate form of defragmentation
routine, called TRIM, which is built into their firmware. TRIM is a command name, not an acronym.
