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If your computer is feeling slow, it might be time to do a little maintenance. There are many ways to speed up Windows. You can check the PC's memory for leaks, uninstall programs to free up disk space, or run a virus scan. However, defragmenting an HDD or trimming an SSD can clean up a computer's data to make things more efficient.
The good news is that Windows will mostly take care of this process automatically, so there's a good chance you don't actually have to do anything! Still, if you feel like your PC could use a refresh, or the optimization process hasn't run recently, it's easy to manually use the feature.
Why Your Drive Needs Defrag/Trim
Traditional hard drives (HDD) use spinning platters to store data in sequential "blocks" across each platter. If you delete some data, the drive will go back and fill those blocks when new data is written—sometimes leading to files getting split apart and stored on two (or more) different sections of the platter.
This results in the drive's head needing to navigate to multiple places to read a single file, thus slowing things down. By defragmenting the drive, you're telling the computer to reassemble those files and combine the free space back into one block, making reading and writing faster.
Note that solid-state drives do not have any moving parts, and are therefore much faster than the HDDs of yore. An SSD can read blocks of data from one spot of the drive just as quickly as from another, so you wouldn't see the same slowdowns. That being said, SSDs do still require some maintenance.
When data is deleted from an SSD, the drive simply marks it as invalid without actually removing anything. Trim tells the drive that it is safe to delete the unused data. Without it, the SSD would hold onto that data until it could overwrite the information, which would slow down the drive. By using trim regularly, you can make sure your SSD never has a chance to slow down.
How to Optimize Your Drive
The optimization process is largely automated in Windows 10 and Windows 11, with the defrag/trim process running on a regular schedule. However, if you want to check the schedule and make sure it's running properly, you can take a peak, tell it to run manually, or alter the default optimization cadence.
Search "defrag" from the Windows taskbar and select the Defragment and Optimize Drives option when it appears. This will open the Optimize Drives window, which will list all the drives in your computer—HDDs and SSDs alike—along with the last date they were analyzed and their current status. If everything is running smoothly, your HDD should read OK (0% fragmented) under Current Status. For an SSD, the status will say "OK" and note when the TRIM command was last run.
By default, optimization should run once a week, but if it looks like it hasn't run in a while, select the drive and click Optimize to run it manually. If you want the optimization process to run more or less often, click Change settings under the Schedule optimization section The schedule can be set to Daily, Weekly, or Monthly
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