Know when to defragment your drive

One feature Microsoft took out of its defragment tool in Vista is the ability to view how fragmented your hard-drive is during the analyze process. But that won’t stop you from knowing how fragmented your hard-drive is becuase there is still a way to find that information. This tutorial will show you your percent file fragmentation and Windows will decide if you need to defragment your volume.

This is all done in command prompt meaning you will not be enjoying the charts that you usually see. If you’re looking for software that can analyze your volume and show data on charts, you can try Auslogics Disk Defrag. However, I don’t recommend this tool for defragmenting your hard drive.

To find out how fragmented your hard-drive is and if you need to defragment…

1) Click on the Start Pearl

2) Type cmd.exe in the search bar and press Enter

3) Then type in: defrag <volume> -a
For example, if I wanted to defragment my F: Drive, I would type: defrag f: -a

Depending on the size of your hard drive, you should receive results in a couple of minutes. Mine took about 3-5 minutes on a 20GB partition.

If you want a more detailed list of statistics, you can type in: defrag <volume> -v
Your screen should look similar to the one below.

If you are planning to defragment your hard-drive, you might want to find out how you can defragment up to 10X faster.

Still need help? Check out our new forums where you can get an even faster and better response!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 12:06 am and is filed under Tutorials, Windows Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.