How to Trim Your SSD and Defrag Your Hard Drive in Windows

If your computer is feeling slow, it might be time to do a little maintenance. There are many ways you can speed up Windows. You can check your PC’s memory for leaks, uninstall programs to free up disk space, or run a virus scan. However, defragmenting your HDD or trimming your SSD can clean up a computer’s data to make things more efficient.

The good news is that Windows will mostly take care of this process automatically, so there’s a good chance you don’t actually have to do anything! Still, if you feel like your PC could use a refresh, or you noticed the optimization process has not run recently, it’s easy to manually use the feature.

Why Your Drive Needs Defrag/Trim

A visual representation of fragmentation and defragmentation
(Credit: XZise / Wikimedia Commons)

Traditional hard drives (HDD) use spinning platters to store data in sequential “blocks” across each platter. If you delete some data, the drive will go back and fill those blocks when you write new data—sometimes leading to files getting split apart and stored on two (or more) different sections of the platter.

This results in the drive’s head needing to navigate to multiple places in order to read the file, thus slowing things down. By defragmenting your drive, you are telling the computer to reassembles those files and combine your free space back into one block, making reading and writing faster.

Note that solid-state drives do not have any moving parts, and are therefore much faster than the HDDs of yore. An SSD can read blocks of data from one spot of the drive just as quickly as from another, so you would not see the same slowdowns. That being said, SSDs do still require some maintenance.

When you delete data on an SSD, the drive simply marks it as invalid without actually removing anything. Trim tells the drive that it is safe to delete the unused data. Without it, the SSD would hold onto that data until it could overwrite the information, which would slow down the drive. By using trim regularly, you can make sure your SSD never has a chance to slow down.

How to Optimize Your Drive

The optimization process is largely automated in Windows 10 and Windows 11, with your computer going through the defrag/trim process on a regular schedule. However, if you want to check the schedule and make sure it’s running properly, you can take a peak, tell it to run manually, or alter the default optimization cadence.

Search “defrag” from the Windows taskbar and select the Defragment and Optimize Drives option when it appears. This will open the Optimize Drives window, which will list all the drives in your computer—HDDs and SSDs alike—along with the last date they were analyzed and their current status.

If everything is running smoothly, your HDD should read OK (0% fragmented) under Current Status. For those with an SSD, the current status will just say “OK” with a note about when the TRIM command was last run. By default, optimization should run once a week, but if it looks like it hasn’t run in a while, you can select the drive and click the Optimize button to run it manually.

If you want the optimization process to run more or less often, click Change settings under the Schedule optimization section The schedule can be set to Daily, Weekly, or Monthly