How to Perform Windows Scheduled Disk Defragmentation?

Why run Windows scheduled disk defragmentation?

Over time, computers with even the best specs can become slow and sluggish which badly affects your efficiency at work or your experience in game. As far as we’re concerned, sometimes, it can be caused by old hardware issues, virus or bundleware attack, or an outdated GPT driver. However, there’s also another factor that affects the user experience and that’s fragmentation of files.

On a PC, our files are stored as a combination of different sectors. After long-term use – save, resave, and deletion, the files’ different part will get scattered across the hard drive disk (HDD) and thus, it takes longer for the files to be found and the PC will eventually feel sluggish.

Defragmentation is a way to reorganize the files by putting their segments back together so that they can be found more easily. Generally, hard drives should be defragged on regular basis and in this case, it’s important to run Windows scheduled disk defragmentation so you can optimize the hard drives daily, weekly, or monthly.

How to set up disk defragmenter schedule in Windows 10?

Scheduling disk defrag, namely, enabling Windows auto defrag, is a more efficient way to optimize your hard drives. But how to carry out Windows scheduled disk defragmentation? If you still have no idea, here, we’ll first take Windows 10 defraggler for example along with a step-by-step guide. Then, a powerful third-party utility that has more options for auto-defrag will be introduced to help get it done with much more ease.

Method 1. Use Windows built-in defraggler

The Windows 10 built-in defraggler allows you to preset defrag frequency – daily, weekly, or monthly. Just read on to learn how to get it to work.

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

2. Under “Best match”, choose “Defragment and Optimize Drives”.

3. Then, hit the option “Change settings” in the “Optimize Drives” window.

4. Now, tick the option “Run a schedule” and then, you can preset frequency for defrag and select which drives to defrag by clicking on “Choose”. Afterwards, hit “OK” to save the changes.

Method 2. Try a third-party disk defrag utility

Windows scheduled disk defragmentation improves the efficiency for hard drive defrag and it’s a good program to some extent. But as you can see, it gives very few options for auto-defrag. So, this time, I’ll recommend another more full-featured software utility – AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional to help you schedule defrag for your hard drives more efficiently and conveniently. It not only allows you to set daily, weekly, monthly defrag, but also, it allows you to decide at which clock, on what conditions, and whether at startup or logon to defrag… What’s more, this software is also a functional disk manager, with it, you can perform various operations in disk management including OS migration, SSD secure erase, and disk format.  

How to set up disk defragmenter schedule in windows 10? Try the best defraggler!

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional and when you see your disks and partitions appear on the home interface, right-click the disk, and choose “Disk Defrag”.

Step 2. In the “Disk Defrag” window, hit “Schedule”.

Step 3. Now, select the drive you want to optimize and decide whether to run defrag daily, weekly or monthly. Then, you can consider presetting on what conditions to defrag.

Besides presetting how often to defrag, you can also determine whether to defrag at startup or at logon.

Optional reading: should I defrag SSDs?

All of the contents above are based on the fact that the hard drive you defrag is an HDD. So, what’s it like when it comes to an SSD? Due to the different working principles of SSDs and HDDs, unlike HDDs, SSDs are able to read scattered data as fast as reading adjacent data. Thus, you don’t necessarily need to defrag SSDs. Meanwhile, SSD defrag will lead to unnecessary wear and tear and reduce their life span.

Conclusion

How to activate Windows scheduled disk defragmentation? After going through all the paragraphs above, you’ve learnt why you should do it and how to get it done without any hassle. Both the Windows built-in defraggler program and a third-party defraggler utility – AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional – have been recommended. By comparison, the latter one provides a much more optional and flexible way for Window disk defrag schedule. If you want to defrag your hard drives on Server, you can try the Server edition of this software.