5 Methods to Optimize Hard Drive on Windows 10

Safe to optimize drives?

Why need to perform hard drive optimization on Windows 10?

When your computer slows down, you might consider optimizing your computer's hard drive, for it has a direct impact on your PC's performance. If the hard drive is not in good condition, it will cause the computer to be unresponsive, and in severe cases, will cause the computer freezes.

Is it beneficial to perform hard drive optimization on Windows 10? Yes! Properly optimizing a hard drive is beneficial when it's performing poorly.

However, you need to be aware that due to the different construction of HDD and SSD, their optimization methods are also different. Defraging HDD will improve its performance, but defraging SSD will seriously damage this SSD.

How to optimize hard drive on Windows 10

How to optimize hard drive on Windows 10? In the following content, we'll talk about some tricks to optimize your hard drive and improve its performance.

▶ Method 1. Defragment hard drive

If your PC hard drive is HDD, its poor performance may be caused by too many file fragments, because the hard drive will spend a lot of time reading the scattered data. So, you can try to defrag HDD to optimize the hard drive with the Defragment and Optimize Drives.

Step 1. Press "Windows", input "defragment and optimize drives" on the taskbar, then press "Enter".

Step 2. In the new popped window, choose the target drive and click "Optimize" to defrag it.

 ▶ Method 2. Turn on the Write Caching

If you purely want to increase the read and write speed of the hard drive, you can enable the Write Caching. Since the computer writes data to the cache faster than to the hard drive, when you enable the Write Caching, the hard drive will be faster. The detailed steps are as follows:

Step 1. Click the "Windows" icon and type "device manager", then press "Enter". In the new window, click "Disk drives".

Step 2. Right-click on the target drive and click "Properties".

Step 3. Select the "Policies" option at the top of the new window, then tick "Enable write caching on the device".

Note: The data stored in the cache is only temporary, so it can be easily losed when your PC is turned off suddenly.

▶ Method 3. Enable Storage Sense

The hard drive also performs poorly when the space of it is insufficient. Therefore, you need to free up hard drive space on your PC. In addition to the commonly used Disk Cleanup, you can also try Storage Sense on Windows 10 to optimize hard drive.

Step 1. Click "Windows" and "Settings", then click "System".

Step 2. In the new window, click "Storage" and turn on "Storage Sense".

Step 3. If you want to set others, you can click "Configure Storage Sense or run it now" for the detail.

Optimize hard drive on Windows 10 with a more powerful tool

In order to optimize hard drive on Windows 10 more effectively, we also recommend you a powerful hard drive optimizer - AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

In a friendly interface, it provides you with solutions on Windows 10 to perform hard drive optimization from different perspectives:

➹ Clean up hard drive: You can use "PC Cleaner" to scan and delete all junk files in your PC hard drive, including stubborn system junk and registry junk files. To further free up hard drive space, the “Delete Large Files” feature will thoroughly scan your computer for all large files, and clean up large files that can be safely deleted.
➹ Optimize disk: "Disk Defrag" will completely defrag with a detailed defragment plan. You can set the specific time and degree of fragment task.
➹ Manage hard drive more effectively: Provide advanced functions, including allocate free space, move applications to another drive, migrate OS to SSD, etc.

✦ Case 1. Delete large files

When you finished cleaning up junk files, you can also perform a deep scan of your computer. Finding the hidden large files, distinguishing and deleting some unwanted ones to optimize the hard drive.

Step 1. In the AOMEI Demo, click "Free up" and "Delete Large Files".

Step 2. Choose the drive you decide to scan and click "Start Scan".

Step 3. All large files found is in the list, click "Delete". The files marked as red be careful to delete.

Step 4. Click "Delete Now" to remove all selected large files.

 ✦ Case 2. Defragment the HDD

AOMEI also prepared "Disk Defrag" function for you, if you don’t want to manually defrag HDD files in the Windows tool, it will be an excellent substitute.

Step 1. Open main interface, click "Disk Defrag".

Step 2. Select the target drive defrag and click "Analyze". 

Step 3. Select the target drive and click "Schedule" to set more.

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

Step 5. Set all the options according to your needs, then click "OK".

Step 6. Click "Defrag" to defrag your hard drive.

There're other versions for you to optimize your hard drive:
☀ The Server Edition can optimize the PC hard drive on Windows Server.
☀ If you want to use AOMEI with others, the Unlimited Version is suitable for you.

✦ Extended reading: Align SSD partitions

Due to the difference between SSD and HDD, you cannot defrag SSD to optimize it. In fact, poor performance is most likely due to misaligned partitions on the SSD.

Therefore, AOMEI provides you with the "Partition Alignment" function to optimize SSD. With just a few simple steps, it can optimize your SSD by aligning 4K sectors on it.

Step 1. Right-click a partition on the SSD, click "Advanced" and "Partition Alignment".

Step 2. In the popped small window, select "4096 Sectors" and click "OK".

Step 3. Click "OK" and "Apply" to align your SSD.

Summary

In this post, we shared 5 methods to optimize hard drive on Windows 10. If you want to easily optimize and speed up your hard drive, don’t miss AOMEI Partition Assistant. Many powerful functions are waiting for you.