Defragment / optimize your data drives in Windows

Manually defragment or optimize your data drives

1. Select the Search bar on the taskbar and enter defrag.

2. Select Defragment and Optimize Drives from the list of results.
   
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3. Select the drive you want to work with.

4. If it's a hard disk drive, select Analyze for Windows to check the drive to see if it needs optimization, or select Optimize for Windows to run optimization on the drive.

   Note: ​​​​​​​Hard drives are defragmented, which is reorganizing the files so that they are all lined up and easier for the drive to read. Solid-state drives (SSDs) are what's known as "trimmed," which is basically telling the drive where it can safely do cleanup work when it's not busy doing more important things like saving or loading your files. It's all optimization.

Change the optimization schedule

By default, Windows automatically optimizes your drives once a week. But you can change that schedule to be more or less frequent:

1. Select the Search bar on the taskbar and enter defrag.

2. Select Defragment and Optimize Drives from the list of results.

3. Under Scheduled optimization, select Change Settings.

4. To change the schedule to Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or turn it off entirely, select the drive to apply changes to and set the schedule to increase the frequency if it misses optimization three times.