When is the Best Windows 10 Defrag Scheduled Time?

When is the best Windows 10 defrag scheduled time?

After several months, the hard drive your devices often read and write will have bad performance. This is caused by file fragments. When the physical memory required by the application program is insufficient, the OS will generate temporary swap files on the hard disk, and virtualize the hard disk space occupied by the files into memory.

The virtual memory management program will frequently read and write to the hard disk, and in the disk partition, the files will be scattered and saved to different places on the disk instead of being continuously saved in the disk, so more and more file fragments will be stored dispersedly on your HDD (SSD won’t raise fragmentation due to the different working method.).

To avoid excessive fragments bringing the bad computer performance, a schedule defragments of your hard drive is necessary. Luckily, Windows 10 has Windows built-in disk defragment application: Defragment and Optimize Drives. Users can defrag their hard drives and optimize disks with this application. And it can help users set defragment schedules to authorize OS automatically to defrag the selected drives.

Usually, personal users should defrag the target disk or drive once every three months, however, this depends on how frequently you use your computer. If you use it for more than 8 hours each day, you should defrag it every two weeks. For business, enterprise, and government users, we recommend defragging once a month.

So, “how often does Windows 10 automatically defragment a hard drive” is decided by your using habit.

How to set disk defragmentation to run on a schedule in Windows 10

To set a schedule to defrag, we can choose Windows tool or professional defragmentation software. We’ll show how to set defrag scheduled time in Windows 10 with two tools.

1. Schedule defrag via Defragment and Optimize Drives

This Windows built-in tool offers users a simple schedule defragment plan. Users can set 3 frequency options and select drives they wish to defrag regularly.

Step 1. Type “Defragment” in the search box, and open the “Defragment and Optimize Drives” app.

Step 2. In the “Optimize Drives” window, click “Change settings” to open the settings of the schedule. If you wish to defrag some drives before setting defrag schedule, you can click a drive, click “Analyze”, then wait for the analysis, and click “Optimize” to defrag it.

Step 3. After clicking the “Change settings”, select the “Frequency” and the drives you wish to defragment regularly.

2. Schedule defrag via professional defragment software

We suggest you close all running programs before you start to defrag your drives because your computer will perform slowly and the data of other running programs might get lost during the defragment. So this is why we recommend you choose a professional defrag tool. Windows application doesn’t allow users to set exact times and dates, so when the schedule defragment starts, users might be using computers. This might cause some problems.

AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional edition has the schedule defrag feature which allows users to set specific defrag time, dates, and users can set a fragment rate to trigger the schedule plan.

This tool supports Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP/Vista, In the following example, we’ll show clear steps is to set a schedule on Windows 10 computer.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, select the target disk or partition, and choose “Disk Defrag” or "Advanced" > “Defrag Partition”.

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, and the time mode to defrag the target drives. You’ll have 5 options about time mode, usually, we choose “Monthly”, just select a suitable mode according to your needs.

Step 4. Tick “Conditions” and click “Define”, you can set the rate of fragmentation to trigger the schedule to defrag your disk. And there is “minutes” for idle time, this is to make sure the program won’t hurt the data of other programs. Click “OK” to save all settings.

Then your Windows 10 computer will defrag selected drives when the environment is proper.

Bonus tips

In Windows 10, defrag scheduled time can be set via Windows tool and third-party tool. AOMEI Partition Assistant also has other practical functions to help you manage your computer like “Convert to GPT/MBR”, “Migrate OS”, or “App Mover”… And Windows Server users can choose Server edition to defrag or use other features to manage Server devices.