When you have used a hard drive for a few months and have regularly copied and removed files on its various partitions, it tends to suffer from fragmentation of files which basically means that a file is stored in form of different fragments on various different physical memory locations on the hard drive. This means that reading of files will take longer time as the header in the hard drive has to find all those locations just to read a single file. In order to remove these fragments, you have to run special tools called defragmentation software that can reduce read access of your hard drives.
UltraDefrag is an open-source defragment utility for Windows. It works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. It offers a unique user interface with color codes where it represents the space on your hard drives with color codes – the blue area means the defragmented files and red area means files are fragmented.
As you launch UltraDefrag, it shows all the partitions on the hard drives attached to your PC. You can select any partition and click on the “Analyze” button in the toolbar to know the fragmentation status of these partitions. The color coded graphical representation is accompanied with some details like how much percentage of the file system is fragmented.
After analysis is complete, you can choose to run the defragmentation, quick optimization or full optimization of the selected partitions. If you want, you can also optimize the MFT (master file table) of the partition which removes the obsolete entries from the table and streamlines to make it small and fast.
UltraDefrag can really improve the hard drive performance for the hard drives that you have been using for 3-4 years or even longer without having to format them. But SSD (solid state drives) or other flash memory based storage devices do not suffer from this problem of fragmentation, so it is not a good idea to use UltraDefrag on SSDs.
You can download UltraDefrag from https://sourceforge.net/projects/ultradefrag.