It’s supposed to make only one pass. A highly fragmented drive, or drive with limited free space takes many more than just one pass.

It can take anywhere from 1-2 passes to 40 passes and more to complete. There is no set amount of defrag. You can also manually set the passes required if you use third party tools.

Disk Defragmenter might take from several minutes to a few hours to finish, depending on the size and degree of fragmentation of your hard disk. You can still use your computer during the defragmentation process.

2TB drive, defragmentation level was at 37%. Free space was 308GB. It took almost exactly two days, 48 hours of non-stop defragmenting for Defraggler to complete the task.

Check the percentage of fragmented files in the results. There’s no hard and fast rule about how fragmented your drive should be before you defrag it. You might want to keep your fragmentation percentage under 5% or so, however, so that the defragmentation process doesn’t take too long to finish.

By default, Windows 7 automatically schedules a disk defragmentation session to run every week. Windows 7 doesn’t defrag solid state drives, such as flash drives. These solid state drives don’t need defragmentation. Besides, they have a limited lifespan, so there’s no need to overwork the drives.

Disk defragging, or more correctly “defragmenting,” is the source of many questions, more than a few misconceptions, and many articles here on Ask Leo! The good news is that for reasons we’ll explore, defragging in Windows 7 is actually something you rarely need think about any more.

If you have less than 5% of your HDD free, you have a bigger problem than slow defrag. Anyway, defragmentation works best when there’s a lot of free disk space to use and that free disk space is contiguous. That’s unlikely to be the case on your HDD.

The Disk Defragmenter runs a low priority task in the background without affecting the performance of the computer. In most of the cases, the defragmenter only runs when your computer is idle. Why do we need Disk Defragmentation?

Defragging can take a very long time depending on how much is actually stored on your PC and how fast the rotation speed is. Ultimately, it will still probably take a few hours even after cleaning off files. You need a bigger drive.