For the most part, Windows handles the optimization of your data drives automatically. However, if you are concerned about their performance and would like to check their statis manually or change the optimization schedule, here's how:

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. ​​​​​​​ The Optimize Drives app in Windows 11.

  3. Select the drive you want to work with.

  4. If it's a hard disk drive, select Analyze if you want Windows to check the drive to see if it needs optimization, or select Optimize to have Windows 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 will automatically optimize your drives once a week. But if you want to change that schedule to be more or less frequent, you can. Here's how:

  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. You can change the schedule to Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or turn it off entirely, set it up to increase the frequency if it misses optimization three times, and select which drives the schedule applies to.

Optimizing your drives can help your PC run smoother and boot up faster. To optimize them:

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

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

  3. Select the disk drive you want to optimize.

  4. Select the Optimize button.

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