Why does it take my computer many hours to defragment the "C" drive and how can I speed up the process?

Answer 1

The only thing that will help the speed on a defragmentation is doing it more often. It may be possible to find one that works faster, but the majority are provided by the OS manufacturer. A defragmentation takes so long because it is reorganizing your hard drive more efficiently. It changes the physical location of segments of files without changing the logical location.

Answer 2

Hi,

Do you have Windows 98? Or maybe you have XP? I am no expert but have sorted my P.C. out several times including difficulty with defragmenting. I would empty temporary files (make sure you don't need any of them, if you haven't needed them in about a week I think it's safe to do so) and cookies first. Use ScanDisc to check for any errors on the drive and it will fix for you. Use Disc Clean up and choose which files to get rid of. Also It would take a little longer if you you are using different programmes or browsing the net at the time, so just let it run. It could be clogged up badly cause you haven't done it in a while, should be done often. Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Most likely because of the large size of your C drive. Most computers now have 40 gigabyte hard drives, which means 40 BILLION bytes, or pieces of information. If your drive is pretty fragmented, it takes a lot of time to put together all the pieces of that amount of information. The only way to speed up the process is to do it more often so that it isn't as fragmented, but then you are just doing the same long process over more shorter times. It is like if you took 40 billion coins (pennies, nickels, dimes, etc) and then had to sort them into the piles of the same coins. It would take a while.

Answer 4

With a pc try starting up & pressing F8 at the same time. Then select start up in 'safe mode' when the menu appears.

This stops unecessary programs running so nothing is writing to disk. Then do your defragment.

Note: If you have a special mouse this may also be disabled so use the keyboard arrows to select defragment in the menu and ctrl+alt+Delete to close the program & shut down at the end.

Answer 5

The bigger the HD and the more on it, the longer it will take. Also, if there is little free space on the drive (almost full) it will take longer as well since it will have to move smaller amounts since it has limited free space. Nothing will really speed it up except replacing hardware like going from a 5400rpm drive to 7200 or 10k, something of that nature. Otherwise, it's just a slow process.

Answer 6

Try SpeeDefrag
- http://www.vcsoftwares.com/SpeeDefrag.html

SpeeDefrag is the exclusive freeware program , which optimizes Windows XP defrag. It restarts your computer, which refreshes the RAM and loads just the defrag.exe program.This imposes minimum load on the system and therefore defragmentation speed is increased.This small software will also shutdown or restart your computer automatically once defrag is over.

Or you can use Power defragmenter GUI
- http://www.majorgeeks.com/Power_Defragmenter_GUI_d4647.html

in conjunction with Sysinternal's excellent Contig
- http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Contig.html

Contig is a single-file defragmenter that attempts to make files contiguous on disk. Its perfect for quickly optimizing files that are continuously becoming fragmented, or that you want to ensure are in as few fragments as possible.

Answer 7

to speed up this process partition your hard drive
ok more drives but use 2nd partition to store you data and install programs. defrag this daily . will take next to no time to do
proberly will speed up you system to i use 3 on 60gb
c:17 just os, d: 15 for programs and e:for storage
10 mins to defrag c: once a week

Answer 8

You cant really speed this process up - it takes EVERY data sector on your harddrive, analyses it and then reorders it so similar clusters are together.

Speed of this process depends on the size of your harddrive, the frequency of defrags (you should do this relatively often to optimise the performance of the drive) and lastly the processing capabilities of your PC( the processor and RAM)

Answer 9

The more free space you have on the drive, the faster the defrag will work. Try deleting unnecessary garbage. Do a windows "Disk Cleanup" first.

Answer 10

1. Use a UNIX based operating system Linnux BSD or the Mac OS X.

2. Don't fill the disk as much if its over 60% full it will tend to fragment a lot and need hours to correct it

3. Place all you data files (ones that change a lot) on a separate drive or partition and keep that no more than 60% used.