What Do You Do to Optimize the OS Hard Drive?

Should I optimize my OS hard drive?

When to optimize the OS hard drive?

Whether it is HDD or SSD, after a period of use, there may be problems such as poor performance or slow speed. If you do not pay attention to the status of the hard drive, it will have a bad impact on the normal operation of your PC, and sometimes even cause the computer freezes.

Here are possible reasons for the OS hard drive poor performance:

✿ lots of junk files accumulated. When you haven’t cleaned your OS hard drive for a long time, excessive junk files may have accumulated on it, causing the hard drive to be in poor condition.
✿ Many file fragments in the hard disk (HDD). If there're too many file fragments, the hard drive will waste time to read data.
✿ Partition misaligned (SSD). When the partitions in your SSD are misaligned, it will cause it to perform badly.
✿ Viruses on the hard drive. Viruses will automatically generate files on your computer's hard drive, taking up space and slowing down it.
✿ Bad sectors. The bad sector is also one of the main reasons for poor hard drive performance. Your hard drive will slow down if there're a lot of bad sectors on it.

Therefore, in order to keep your OS in top shape, you need to optimize it in time. If you don't know what do you do to optimize the OS hard drive, please refer to the following method.

What do you do to optimize the OS hard drive?

When the OS hard drive is not in good condition, it will reduce the users' experience of the PC. In order to maintain the fluency of the computer, please try the following methods to optimize your OS hard drive.

│Method 1. Run Disk Cleanup to clean up the OS hard drive

Various junk files in the computer will occupy the OS hard drive space. Therefore, you can first clean them up using Windows built-in tool Disk Cleanup.

Step 1. Press "Windows" and type "disk cleanup", then press "Enter".

Step 2. In the small window, the target drive in the computer, here we choose C drive and click "OK". Tick the files you want to remove and click "OK".

│Method 2. Run Defragment and Optimize Drives

If your OS hard drive is HDD, its low working efficiency may be caused by file fragments in the hard drive. You can use Defragment and Optimize Drives to solve it:

Step 1. In the Windows task bar, input "defragment and optimize drives", press "Enter" to open this tool.

Step 2. In the "Optimize Drives" window, choose the drive you need to optimize and then click "Optimize".

A more powerful OS hard drive optimizer

What do you do to optimize the OS hard drive? If you find it annoying to jump between different Windows built-in tools, you can try an almighty third-party software - AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

It can provide you with hard drive cleaning and optimization functions at the same time, you only need a few simple clicks to optimize your OS hard drive in Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP:

✌ With the help of "PC Cleaner", you can scan and delete all junk files in your computer; in addition, the "Delete Large Files" function can thoroughly find out all large files in your computer, and distinguish which ones can be safely deleted.

✌ With the "Disk Defrag" function, you can make a detailed defragment plan, setting the specific time and degree of fragmentation work.

Tip: You can also use basic disk managing functions such as Wipe hard drive, Resize partition, Create partition, Format partition, Change drive letter, etc.

Let's see how to optimize hard drive performance.

│Case 1. Delete large files

To clean up your OS hard drive, please follow the steps below：

Step 1. Download and open AOMEI Demo, click "Free up" and "Delete Large Files".

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

Step 3. In the new interface, you can see all large files is in the list, click "Delete". Please pay attention to the files marked as red.

Step 4. Click "Delete Now" to start the large files deleting task.

│Case 2. Defrag disk

In order to effectively optimize your OS hard drive, you also need to manage file fragmentation on it. Please follow the steps below to defrag files, speeding up your OS hard drive.

Step 1. In the main interface of AOMEI Professional, right-click the target disk and select the "Disk Defrag" function.

Step 2. Select the drive you want to defrag and click "Analyze".

Step 3. You can click "Schedule" to set more.

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

Step 5. Set all the options below, then click "OK".

Step 6. Click "Defrag" to start the disk defragment.

Further reading: How to improve the performance of an SSD

Please note that you can't use the above method to optimize SSD, because the construction of HDD and SSD is different. If you forcibly defrag the SSD, it will be damaged and even shorten its lifespan.

To optimize your SSD, you can use the "Partition Alignment" feature. It can align the 4K sectors on the SSD, bringing the SSD to the best condition.

Step 1. Right-click a partition, then select "Advanced" and "Partition Alignment".

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

Step 3. Click "OK" and "Apply" to start the partition aligning task.

Conclusion

What do you do to optimize the OS hard drive? In this article, we have shared some simple methods with which you can optimize your OS hard drive.

By the way, if you want to optimize your OS hard drive on a Windows Server computer, you can go to the Server Edition.