Optimize and Defragment Drives in Windows 11

Optimizing your drives can help your PC run smoother and boot up faster.

Windows 11 includes Optimize Drives that will automatically retrim a SSD or defrag a HDD as needed.

Retrim = Generates TRIM and Unmap hints for all currently unused sectors of the SSD or NVMe volume, notifying the underlying storage that the sectors are no longer needed and can be purged. This can recover unused capacity on thinly provisioned drives.
Defrag = Locates and consolidates fragmented files on local HDD volumes to improve system performance.

Optimize Drives runs automatically on a weekly schedule at the time set in automatic maintenance. You can also manually run Optimize Drives on demand as needed.

This tutorial will show you how to optimize and defragment drives in Windows 11.