Best Hard Drive Optimization Software for Windows Computer

Why do you need to optimize hard drive regularly?

Although SSD has taken up a large share of the disk market, HDD is still a nice choice if you want to enlarge the storage capacity. However, unlike SSD, due to the working scheme of HDD, it needs you to take care of daily usage.

HDDs use magnetic disks to store data and read it with reading/writing heads. Only the new hard disk can store files in succession when it stores data for the first time. Files are dispersed and stored over the whole disk as time passes, rather than being kept in continuous clusters. The pieces are then lifted. If the user needs to access a program, the reading/writing heads will need to search the target files for a longer period of time. As a result, your HDD will waste more time allowing your computer to run programs, and your computer will be slower.

To optimize hard drive, you can defrag it regularly. Compared to other tech methods, defrag is a straightforward approach to keeping your HDD in good shape. It can reorganize the divided files in an organized fashion to minimize your HDD's seeking time. As a result, it can boost the performance of your HDD and computer while also reducing loading time.

How often do you need to defrag hard drive?

How frequently should you defrag your hard drive? If you are a home user, you can defrag your HDD once every three months; if you use your computer every day for more than eight hours, you can defrag once every two weeks. We propose defragging once a month for commercial, business, and government users based on their working environment.

Best hard drive optimization software

There are so many tools when you search the internet for the finest disk optimizer, you may be confused by so many articles like "20 Best Defrag Software for Disk Defragmentation" or "10 Best Defragmenter Software To Defrag Windows 10 Hard Drive" and you don't know which one should be your first option at all.

In fact, before defragging, usually, we suggest users clean junk files on the hard drive first. The reason is evident, the defrag tool will also reorder the junk files, which will take more time. So, if you need hard drive optimization software, you’d better choose the one with both the junk file cleaning feature and the defrag feature.

Here, we recommend you AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, a free disk and partition manager for Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP computers. This tool has “PC Cleaner” and “Disk Defrag” functions.

The “PC Cleaner” feature can scan all junk files on the disk and in the system to filter all unnecessary files. After the scanning, users only need to click the clean button, all unneeded files will be cleaned. Then, you can run the “Disk Defrag” function to quickly defrag your HDD.

Part 1. Clean all junk files on the hard drive

Step 1. Launch and open AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, and then click "Free up" > "PC Cleaner".

Step 2. In the pop-up window, click "Start Scan" to scan for junk files.

Step 3. Wait for a while until the scanning process completes. If you want to stop, just click "Cancel Scan".

Step 4. After the scan is completed, all kinds of available junk files will be listed. Then, tick the junk files you want to clean, then click "Clean All" to begin the cleaning process.

Step 5. When the cleaning is done, click "Back" to exit.

Now your HDD is cleaned.

Part 2. Defrag hard drive to improve disk performance

After the cleaning, now we can optimize the hard drive.

Note: Never defrag your SSD, or your performance and lifespan will be damaged. To optimize an SSD, you can ask "secure erase SSD" for help.

Step 1. Open AOMEI software, in the interface, right-click on the target disk and click "Disk Defrag".

Step 2. Select the target disk and click "Analyze".

Step 3. When the analysis is completed, the disk will be scored. You can click “Details” to get more information or click "Defrag" option to start defragging.

Step 4. Wait for a while, the defragment will be completed soon and you will get a new score again. Set a schedule to perform disk defragment regularly or scroll down to learn more ways of disk optimization.

Further tips: Release disk space via transfer apps to another drive

If your hard drive is a system disk, and you meet a low disk space warning, then defragment and cleaning junk files may both not help you a lot. If there is an external hard drive you keep using on your PC or there is more than one partition on your hard drive, then you can upgrade to the Professional Edition of this tool to employ “App Mover” to move installed programs to another drive (this drive should not be moved to another PC).

Ending lines

If you need hard drive optimization software, AOMEI Partition Assistant is a great option for you. What’s more, if you want to change your HDD with an SSD, this tool can also offer a disk clone feature to help you conveniently set up new disk without reinstalling anything. It can also convert a disk to MBR/GPT without deleting partitions, convert file systems between NTFS/FAT32 without formatting, and so on.

And if you are using Windows Server 2025/2022/2019/2016/2012(R2)/2008(R2)/2003, it has the Server Edition for you.