drives – Windows Blog by Brink

drives

Add or Remove Drives in Send to Context Menu in Windows 11

The Send to context menu allows you to quickly send a copy of items (ex: files, folders, libraries) to Bluetooth device, Compressed (zipped) folder, Desktop (create shortcut), Documents, Mail recipient, and removable and network drives.

To move an item instead of copy and item, you can right click or press and hold on a file or folder, click/tap on Show more options, click/tap on Send to, press and hold the Shift key, and click/tap on a drive or folder location in the Send to context menu.

This tutorial will show you how to enable or disable showing removable and network drives in the Send to context menu for your account or all users in Windows 10 and Windows 11.

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Add Optimize to Context Menu of 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 add Optimize to the context menu of drives in Windows 10 and Windows 11 to make it easier to optimize and defrag drives on demand.

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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.

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Add or Remove Duplicate Drives in Navigation Pane of File Explorer in Windows 11

Removable drives are shown as separate groups in the navigation pane of File Explorer by default in addition to being shown under the This PC group in the navigation pane.

OS drives and fixed drives (ex: internal drives) will only be shown under This PC, and not separately in the navigation pane.

This tutorial will show you how to add or remove the drives showing twice in the navigation pane of File Explorer for all users in Windows 11.

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