You Can Defrag Your Hard Drive In Windows 11. Here’s How – SlashGear

Before we lay out the simple steps to a smoother, faster hard drive, take note of the following caveat. Only consider defragging a drive if it’s a standard hard disk drive (HDD), which has moving parts that physically jump around the disk to read it. In comparison, modern solid-state drives (SSDs) don’t have moving components; reading and writing data is instant, and defragging does nothing to improve their performance.

In fact, defragging an SSD can worsen performance. Solid-state drives have a limited lifespan, and defragging wears them out by needlessly chipping away at the limited number of lifetime write cycles. With that said, Windows offers a way to speed up solid-state drives that shouldn’t be defragged called TRIM; it is featured in the Windows defragging tool and optimizes solid-state drives without wearing them out. 

Secondly, your Windows 11 machine has likely been quietly defragging your drives in the background. You can set it to automatically defrag drives as needed if the option isn’t already enabled. Lastly, if you’re on a laptop, make sure it’s plugged in or has plenty of charge. Defragging can take some time, depending on how long it has been since the last optimization.