A computer's hard drive performance has slowed over time. A brief look at Performance Monitor reveals that the disk read/writes are taking longer than expected. Which of the following actions would MOST LIKELY fix the problem?

When files are written to a hard drive, they are not necessarily written in the same order (with all of the data in a single location). As a result, file data is dispersed across the drive, increasing the time required to retrieve files from the disk. Defragmenting a disk entails evaluating the disk and then combining fragmented files and directories so that they occupy a contiguous space, improving file retrieval performance.