How to schedule defrag Windows 11 hard drive? Find methods to improve the performance of HDD with Windows Settings or a practical tool.
As long as you choose HDD instead of SSD, you’ll confront the problem of the file fragments. What is fragmentation? How to deal with it? Let’s read more about fragmentation at first.
1. Fragmentation Due to the working way of traditional hard drives, the discontinuous files will generate in the process of reading and writing.
When you delete files, the space will be released; but if there are new files, they’ll be stored in the space your hard drive released before. Then the new files have to split into pieces to store in the space on the disk, thus, the fragments appear.
If the files are stored continuously, the hard drive only needs to find out the entire file in order to read the file. But if it’s reading a fragmented file, your hard drive needs to find the file in each location where the file is stored. Especially for mechanical hard disks, when the file is continuous, the disk can complete one revolution to read all the data. If the file is not continuous, not only need to rotate the disk a few more times, but even the head that may read the data also needs to move.
Therefore, disk fragmentation will increase the seek time of the hard disk and affect the performance of your devices.
2. Schedule disk defrag Since the fragmentation will decrease the performance and affect the efficiency of the entire system, defragmentation is important. The process of defragmentation can rearrange the messy files to help the disk work efficiently.
3. Do Windows 11/10 automatically defrag the disk? In fact, users can manually run the program of defragmentation built-in Windows 11/10 or set a schedule to defrag tasks in that tool to defragment the selected disk regularly. We’ll show all details in the next part.
In this part, we’ll introduce how to schedule defragment hard drive in Windows 10 and the newly released Windows 11.
In Windows, you can search the “Defragment and Optimise Drives” program and launch it to realize the schedule defrag.
Step 1. Type “ Defragment” in the search box, and open the “Defragment and Optimise Drives” app.
Step 2. In the program, please click “Change settings” to set the schedule.
Step 3. Once you click the “Change settings”, you’ll see a pop window. In this window, you can select the “Frequency” and the drives you wish to defragment regularly.
After you set all, you’ll back to the interface of the program. You can also manually run the defragmentation by clicking “Optimise”.
Although the Windows built-in tool has a defragment tool for users, you must find that this tool doesn’t give you sufficient options to flexibly set the personal schedule settings. AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional can totally allow you to personalize your smart defrag plan. You can set the exact date, time, even the specific degree of the fragmentation. All settings will help your Windows computer defrag much intelligently and efficiently.
This program supports Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP/Vista and it also has the Server edition to help Windows Server users.
Let’s see details about this pragmatic tool.
Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro, right-click the target disk or partition, and choose “Disk Defrag”.
Step 2. In the pop window, you can see all your used drives. Because we need to set a schedule, you need to click the button “Schedule”, but you can also directly defrag the disk or partition if you want.
Step 3. In the schedule settings, you can select drives, the specific date and time to defrag the target drives, then click “OK” to save the settings.
Step 4. Click “Conditions”, you can set the degree of fragmentation to trigger the schedule to defrag your disk. And there are other options to help you make a detailed schedule.
After you set all options, you’ll go back to the window of defragment. You can also defrag the disks and drives if you want to manually defrag your drives before the schedule begins.
These are two 2 methods about how to set a schedule to defrag in Windows 11/10. Actually, AOMEI Partition Assistant can also be used in other Windows systems, you don’t need to worry you can’t enjoy this great tool in other systems.
It also has other powerful features such as “Convert to GPT/MBR”, “Migrate OS”, “Disk Clone Wizard”, etc.