Hard Disk Maintenance - Windows Tools, Don't ignore

Don't ignore your Hard Disk maintenance.

Inner view of a Hard disk

Are you really ignoring? If yes, then the life span of your hard disk is decreasing each day, & sooner you'll be facing the blue problem of Hard Disk Crash which may lead to a nightmare if worse conditions so prevail that Data Recovery becomes impossible even with Recovery tools like Pandora Recovery.

Hence,  there's a need of some routine maintenance of hard disks for fast, smooth, & healthy performance. The heuristic part is that every OS offers maintenance tools, but a handful of Enthusiasts use them.

Here, I'll discuss about 2 predefined tools in Windows OS viz.
Disk Cleanup & Disk Defragmenter.

Disk Cleanup
Almost every activity you do in a computer (from installing applications to updating them or just surfing), involves creation of temporary files which causes the disk to fill up & also causes fragmentation of data. Some programs don't even bother to delete them. Hence, Windows provides this disk cleaning tool.
Goto Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup
Now just select the drive you wanna clean, then you are given a few options on what to clean. Select the ones you may prefer & click OK. That's it.

Disk Defragmenter
With the size of apps & other media getting larger these days, their regular use causes fragmentation (Dispersed arrangement of memory elements) of files on the disk. Obviously, this slows the access to the files. Hence, this tool re-arranges the memory elements to increase their contiguity for a faster access time.
Goto Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter
Now select the drive & analyze for fragmentation. If defragmentation is required, go ahead & start it.
There are also some Third-party good defragmentation tools like IOBit Smart Defrag etc. which you can use with more features like Scheduled defrag, Auto-defrag etc.

Note: You should run a Defragmenter once a week for optimum results, coz Very frequent use may damage your hard disk.

So, now you are your Disk Doctor. Better remember what you read.