Defragging is like putting air in your tires. It’s something you need to do every once in a while, but it’s awfully tedious. Windows comes with a defragging tool, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t better ones out there. Certainly, there are great commercial-grade defrag utilities, but we like free. Auslogics Disk Defrag is a small, fast and free tool to handle your drive defragmenting needs hard drives, flash drives and even USB keys. So why do we like it? It really does seem noticeably faster than the stock defrag tool.
So why do we even need to defrag a drive? Windows likes to split files in pieces and scatter those bits all over the drive. The more fragmented your hard drive is, the more work your hard drive needs to do to gather the data. This lessens the lifespan of your hard drive and slows your system down. PCTechBytes recommends defragging quarterly for average users, monthly for power users. Defragging too much is not advisable, as it can also lessen the life of your hard drive due to excessive wear and tear.
So give Auslogics Disk Defrag a try. If you don’t like it, you can always uninstall.
I have to admit I love this free tool. It seems like the video recoding and recording I do is especially bad about fragmenting files. This program is really small but still manages to run circles around the one included with Windows. The latest version lets you analyze the drive to see the degree of fragmenting. So if you have the older model that just defrags automatically then an upgrade is worthwhile. Another new feature that I love is the automatic shutdown when the task is finished. Now you can let it do the work and leave it to turn the PC off afterwards. It’s something everyone should have installed because it works great and the price can’t be beat.