[Solved] How to Optimize Your Hard Drive for Speed

When the hard drive is low, you may want to know how to optimize your hard drive for speed. You can refer to this article for the answers.

Tina

By Tina / Updated on May 12, 2023

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About hard drive optimization

When users encounter poor computer performance, especially slow speed, they always look for ways to optimize their PC on the Internet. Because the computer hard drive affects the use of the computer to a large extent, it is more important to optimize your computer hard drive.

Hard Drive Speed

How to optimize your hard drive for speed? There are many potential factors to reduce the performance of your hard drive, such as excessive junk files, a lot of file fragmentation on the HDD, bad sectors, etc. So you need to take the targeted measures.

How to optimize your hard drive for speed

In order to optimize your hard drive in time, we will share with you two Windows built-in tools to clean up junk files and defrag your hard drive.

Method 1. Defragment the hard drive

Since HDD is a mechanical hard disk, it mainly performs operations such as reading and writing information by rotating the disk. If there are many file fragments distributed in different locations on the hard drive, it will consume much time for the head to search for the files.

Therefore, you can use the Windows built-in tool Defragment and Optimize Drives, defraging your hard drive effectively.

Step 1. Press Windows key, input "defragment and optimize drives" in the task bar, then press "Enter".

Optimize Drive Tool

Step 2. In the new window, choose the target drive to optimize and then click "Optimize".

Optimize Drive

Method 2. Clean up unnecessary files

Facts have proven, when you don't clean up your hard drive for a long time, it will lead to the accumulation of a lot of junk files. Over time, they may take up hard drive space and slow it down. 

You can use Disk Cleanup to remove unnecessary files in the hard disk to optimize it.

Step 1. In the Windows task bar, type "disk cleanup" and press "Enter".

Step 2. In a small window popped, choose C drive and click "OK". Then, tick the files you want to remove and click "OK" in the Disk Cleanup interface.

C Drive Cleanup

A powerful hard drive optimizer to speed up your hard drive

In addition to the above two methods, we also want to recommend you AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard - a perfect hard disk optimizer, to help you improve HDD and SSD performance more easily.

Why it is perfect? The following are some reasons:

It provides you with a user-friendly interface and detailed guidance.
It can work on Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP.
It provides more than one method to achieve disk speedup, including clone partitions to another drive, disk defrag, cleanup junk files, etc.
It can also check your hard disk health in an all-round way.

Free download and see how to optimize your hard drive for speed with it.

Download Freeware Win 11/10/8.1/8/7/XP
Secure Download

Case 1. Check hard drive health

If you don't know much about the health of your HDD, you can check it first with AOMEI Partition Assistant.

Step 1. Right-click on the target partition, choose "Advanced" and "Check Partition" in turn.

Advanced

Step 2. There are 3 methods to check your hard drive: "Check partition and fix errors in this partition by using chkdsk.exe", "Check partition for errors by using chkdsk.exe" and "Check whether there is bad sector on the partition". Here, we choose the second option and click "OK".

Click OK

Step 3. You can see the process on the popped window when it works. Wait for a while, this task will be completed, then click "OK".

Check Partition

Case 2. PC Cleaner

After checking the condition of the hard drive, you can use the "PC Cleaner" function to thoroughly scan and remove all stubborn junk files in the hard drive to free up space.

Step 1. In the main interface of AOMEI standard, click "Free up" and "PC Cleaner". 

PC Cleaner

Step 2. Click "Start Scan" to scan your hard drive for all junk files, including system ans registry junk files.

Start Scan

Step 3. All junk files on the target hard drive will be found out, choose the junk files you want to remove and click "Clean All".

After Scanning

Step 4. Click "Back" when you see the following interface.

Back

How to further optimize your hard drive

How to optimize hard drive performance deeply? If you want to further improve the performance of your computer, you can upgrade to the Professional Version.

With "Delete Large Files", you can free up more hard disk space; with "Defrag Disk", you can set up a more detailed disk defragging plan; with "Partition Alignment", you can align partitions on the SSD to improve performance.

Free Download Win 11/10/8.1/8/7/XP
Secure Download

Method 1. Defrag disk

When your hard drive is HDD, please follow the steps to defrag and optimize it.

Step 1. Upgrade to AOMEI Professional, then click "Disk Defrag".

Disk Defrag

Step 2. Select the target to defrag and click "Analyze" to analyze it. 

Analyze

Step 3. Click "Schedule" to see more settings.

Click Schedule

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

Conditions

Step 5. Tick the options according to your requirement, click "OK".

Tick Options

Step 6. Finally, click "Defrag" to optimize the target hard drive.

Defrag

Method 2. Delete large files

In order to further clean up computer space, the "Delete Large Files" function will help you thoroughly find out all large files that can be deleted.

Step 1. Click "Free up" and "Delete Large Files".

Delete Large Files

Step 2. Choose the drive to clean up and click "Start Scan".

Start Scan

Step 3. Click "Delete" to delete all the selected large files.

Delete

Step 4. Click "Delete Now" to start the operation.

Delete Now

Notes:
If you don't know how to optimize SSD for faster performance, you can try the "Partition Alignment" feature to optimize it for speed.
You can also allocate free space, migrate OS to SSD, merge partitions to manage your hard drive.

Verdict

How to optimize your hard drive for speed? In this post, we have shared several methods to optimize hard drive. By the way, if you want to optimize your hard drive on Windows Server, you can try the Server Edition.

 
Tina
Tina · Staff Editor
Tina is an English editor of AOMEI Technology. She has a positive attitude and full of energy. On her work, she always keeps thinking to figure out the solutions for users' problems, and writes the answers so that can help someone. In her daily life, she likes to sing, watch TV and sleep. She always being grateful and happy to all the things happened and all the people encountered.