[Solved] How to Optimize Your Hard Drive for Speed

About hard drive optimization

When users encounter poor computer performance, especially slow speed, they always look for ways to optimize their PC on the Internet. Because the computer hard drive affects the use of the computer to a large extent, it is more important to optimize your computer hard drive.

How to optimize your hard drive for speed? There are many potential factors to reduce the performance of your hard drive, such as excessive junk files, a lot of file fragmentation on the HDD, bad sectors, etc. So you need to take the targeted measures.

How to optimize your hard drive for speed

In order to optimize your hard drive in time, we will share with you two Windows built-in tools to clean up junk files and defrag your hard drive.

│Method 1. Defragment the hard drive

Since HDD is a mechanical hard disk, it mainly performs operations such as reading and writing information by rotating the disk. If there are many file fragments distributed in different locations on the hard drive, it will consume much time for the head to search for the files.

Therefore, you can use the Windows built-in tool Defragment and Optimize Drives, defraging your hard drive effectively.

Step 1. Press Windows key, input "defragment and optimize drives" in the task bar, then press "Enter".

Step 2. In the new window, choose the target drive to optimize and then click "Optimize".

│Method 2. Clean up unnecessary files

Facts have proven, when you don't clean up your hard drive for a long time, it will lead to the accumulation of a lot of junk files. Over time, they may take up hard drive space and slow it down. 

You can use Disk Cleanup to remove unnecessary files in the hard disk to optimize it.

Step 1. In the Windows task bar, type "disk cleanup" and press "Enter".

Step 2. In a small window popped, choose C drive and click "OK". Then, tick the files you want to remove and click "OK" in the Disk Cleanup interface.

A powerful hard drive optimizer to speed up your hard drive

In addition to the above two methods, we also want to recommend you AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard - a perfect hard disk optimizer, to help you improve HDD and SSD performance more easily.

Why it is perfect? The following are some reasons:

✿ It provides you with a user-friendly interface and detailed guidance.
✿ It can work on Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP.
✿ It provides more than one method to achieve disk speedup, including clone partitions to another drive, disk defrag, cleanup junk files, etc.
✿ It can also check your hard disk health in an all-round way.

Free download and see how to optimize your hard drive for speed with it.

│Case 1. Check hard drive health

If you don't know much about the health of your HDD, you can check it first with AOMEI Partition Assistant.

Step 1. Right-click on the target partition, choose "Advanced" and "Check Partition" in turn.

Step 2. There are 3 methods to check your hard drive: "Check partition and fix errors in this partition by using chkdsk.exe", "Check partition for errors by using chkdsk.exe" and "Check whether there is bad sector on the partition". Here, we choose the second option and click "OK".

Step 3. You can see the process on the popped window when it works. Wait for a while, this task will be completed, then click "OK".

│Case 2. PC Cleaner

After checking the condition of the hard drive, you can use the "PC Cleaner" function to thoroughly scan and remove all stubborn junk files in the hard drive to free up space.

Step 1. In the main interface of AOMEI standard, click "Free up" and "PC Cleaner". 

Step 2. Click "Start Scan" to scan your hard drive for all junk files, including system ans registry junk files.

Step 3. All junk files on the target hard drive will be found out, choose the junk files you want to remove and click "Clean All".

Step 4. Click "Back" when you see the following interface.

How to further optimize your hard drive

How to optimize hard drive performance deeply? If you want to further improve the performance of your computer, you can upgrade to the Professional Version.

With "Delete Large Files", you can free up more hard disk space; with "Defrag Disk", you can set up a more detailed disk defragging plan; with "Partition Alignment", you can align partitions on the SSD to improve performance.

│Method 1. Defrag disk

When your hard drive is HDD, please follow the steps to defrag and optimize it.

Step 1. Upgrade to AOMEI Professional, then click "Disk Defrag".

Step 2. Select the target to defrag and click "Analyze" to analyze it. 

Step 3. Click "Schedule" to see more settings.

Step 4. Choose the drive and time to defrag it, then click "OK". Click "Conditions" to set the degree of the fragmentation.

Step 5. Tick the options according to your requirement, click "OK".

Step 6. Finally, click "Defrag" to optimize the target hard drive.

│Method 2. Delete large files

In order to further clean up computer space, the "Delete Large Files" function will help you thoroughly find out all large files that can be deleted.

Step 1. Click "Free up" and "Delete Large Files".

Step 2. Choose the drive to clean up and click "Start Scan".

Step 3. Click "Delete" to delete all the selected large files.

Step 4. Click "Delete Now" to start the operation.

Notes:
✍ If you don't know how to optimize SSD for faster performance, you can try the "Partition Alignment" feature to optimize it for speed.
✍ You can also allocate free space, migrate OS to SSD, merge partitions to manage your hard drive.

Verdict

How to optimize your hard drive for speed? In this post, we have shared several methods to optimize hard drive. By the way, if you want to optimize your hard drive on Windows Server, you can try the Server Edition.