Does Windows 10 Automatically Defrag – How to Enable It?

How often should I defrag Windows 10?

“I heard that defrag can improve the performance of Windows 10 PC. As my 3-year-old PC has become literally sluggish recently, I’m wondering whether I should defrag it on regular basis? How often should I defrag Windows 10? Does Windows 10 defragment automatically? Where can I schedule it? Can anyone help?”

Overview of hard drive defrag

Nowadays, even the most high-end computers can become sluggish and slow sometimes. There’re many causes that can slow down a PC’s performance, and one of them is the fragmentation of hard drives. Over time, as files are saved, re-saved, or deleted on the hard drive, small info packets will eventually be scattered across the hard drive, instead of being all together.

On a traditional spinning HDD, these files take more time to find because the read head has to move to different locations on the hard drive rather than read data in consecutive sectors. Thus, the speed of your computer can be severely slowed down.

Defrag means putting files together again. Because the OS clears the spaces between files, the data gets effectively compressed and in turn, the speed of your PC gets increased.

Does Windows 10 automatically defrag your hard drive?

As you can see above, it’s important to defrag your PC or laptops on regular basis to improve computing efficiency. You may not want to manually defrag Windows 10 every day, every week, or every month since it’s can be time-consuming. Thus, you may ask “whether Windows 10 automatically defrag hard drives?”

The answer is yes. Like other Windows versions, Windows 10 provides its built-in disk defraggler and with which, users can preset defrag frequency - daily, weekly, or monthly which makes hard drive defrag much easier.

How to enable Windows 10 auto defrag?

Windows 10 has its own defraggler but you don’t know how to set auto-defrag with it? Don’t worry. Just follow the step-by-step guide to get it done correctly.

1. In the search bar on the lower left of the desktop, type “defrag”.

2. Select the “Best Match” – “Defragment and Optimize Drives”.

3. In the “Optimize Drives” window, click on “Change settings”.

4. Now, you can preset defrag frequency and select the drives to defrag. After that, remember to tick the option “Increase task priority…”.

5. Click on “OK” to save the changes.

An alternative to Windows 10 built-in defraggler for auto-defrag

The Windows 10 built-in defrag tool gives us a convenient and straightforward way to optimize hard drives as you can see from previous paragraphs. However, next, I’ll recommend a much more powerful and full-featured software utility – AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional - that enables you to decide at which clock and on what condition the PC should be defragged. Moreover, the software also provides another way to enhance PC performance – SSD 4K alignment.

Better than Windows 10 auto defrag, you might as well try this impressive disk manager to optimize your hard drives more efficiently!

Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional and when all disks and their partitions appear on the home interface, right-click the disk, and choose “Disk Defrag”.

Step 2. Hit “Schedule” in the popup window.

Step 3. Now, select which drive to optimize and preset defrag frequency -daily, weekly, or monthly. Meanwhile, you can decide on what conditions to defrag.

Or you can also choose to start defragging at startup or at logon.

After these presetting them, click on "OK" to save the changes.

People often ask

Does defrag delete files?

Disk defrag doesn’t delete any files and it’s a just process to make scattered file packets back together so that data can be read faster.

How long does a defrag take?

It can vary from 10 minutes to several hours for disk defrag and the length mainly depends on how terribly the hard drives are fragmented. But if you run disk defrag on regular basis, the process can be shorter.

Should I defrag my SSD on Windows 10?

The working principles of SSDs and HDDs are different. SSD is able to read data scattered across hard drives as fast as reading data that are adjacent to each other. Thus, you don't need to defrag SSDs. Meanwhile, defragging SSDs will cause unnecessary wear and tear and it will reduce their life span.

Conclusion

Does Windows 10 automatically defrag? Windows 10 has its built-in disk defraggler and of course, it enables it users to set defrag frequency for auto-defrag. However, this time, a more powerful third-party disk defraggler with more options is introduced and that’s AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. With it, you cannot only decide how often your hard disks should be defragged, but also, you can decide at which clock and on what condition they’ll be defragged. As a powerful disk manager, the AOMEI product provides other features including SSD secure erase, partition check, and OS migration as well. If you want to defrag your Server computer, you can try the Server edition of this software.