How to defrag your hard drive in Windows 10

[JamieKavanagh]

Back in the days of Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, defragging your hard drive was a regular task like running an antivirus scan. The file system was a little chaotic and caused system slowdowns the more you used Windows. Windows 10 is a little more organized and doesn’t mess things up in quite the same way. That said, it’s always good to keep things tidy, so if you want to defrag your hard drive in Windows 10, here’s how you do it.

Important note: If you have an SSD in your computer, you do not need to defrag it. Most newer SSD use TRIM to keep things organized. Manually implementing defrag on an SSD can shorten its operating life. Windows 10 optimizes SSDs once per month using TRIM so you don’t have to do a thing.

Defrag your hard drive in Windows 10
To defrag a standard non-SSD hard drive, do this:

1. Type or paste ‘optimize’ into the Search Windows box.
2. Select the hard drive you want to defrag and click Analyze. If, like in the image above, Analyze is greyed out, it means Windows 10 recently checked the drive and doesn’t need to do it again.
3. Select Optimize.
4. Let the process complete and either select another drive or click Close.

You can automate this task so you don’t have to remember to do it yourself. The Optimize Drives window tells you whether automatic optimization is set or not. If yours is set to Off, do this:

1. Select Change settings.
2. Check the box next to ‘Run on a schedule’.
3. Set the frequency, I use weekly.
4. Select Choose next to Drives and put a check in the box next to each drive you want to keep optimized.

More Windows 10 administration tips you might like:
How to get into advanced startup options in Windows 10
Quick guide to optimizing Windows 10
How to Optimize boot performance of Windows 10

View all of our Windows 10 Tutorials