Optimize and defragment disks with Norton Utilities Ultimate

Norton Utilities Ultimate optimizes your hard disks to help maximize the usable free space. It improves performance and storage efficiency by re-organizing your hard disk drive to ensure that fragments of the same file are stored together.

This feature does not support external hard drives. You cannot optimize and defragment external hard disks with Norton Utilities Ultimate.

When the drive head of your hard disk accesses all the file data in one location, the file is read into the memory faster. Disk optimization defragments your hard disk, consolidates free space, and improves computer performance.

Optimize and defragment your disks

Open Norton Utilities Ultimate.
On the main menu, click Optimize Disks.
In the Optimize Disks window, click Scan/Rescan.

Wait for the scan to complete.
Based on the recommended actions for each disk, click one of the following options:

Disk fragmentation and how it impacts your computer

Your computer's hard disk stores all your files, applications, and the Windows operating system. Over time, the bits of information that make up your files gradually spread over the disk. This process is known as fragmentation. The more you use your computer, the more fragmented your disks become.

The operating system tries to store file data in contiguous sectors on the disk so that the drive heads can move sequentially, reading each sector in turn. When a file is deleted, the operating system tries to reclaim that deleted space. If a new file being written is bigger than the contiguous space available, the operating system will have to fragment the file. Reading and writing now involves the drive heads having to move across the disk to find all the fragments of the file, thus, slowing down the process. Over time, more files are added and deleted, which increases this fragmentation and lowers the performance of the computer. Defragmentation is the rearranging of these sectors so that file data is stored contiguously.