The performance of the hard drive has a crucial impact on the gaming experience. Here arises a question: how can you optimize the hard drive for gaming on Windows 10/11? In this guide, we will walk you through several methods to improve your hard drive's performance for gaming.

Why Is It Necessary to Optimize the Hard Drive for Gaming?

Contemporary PC games demand a lot, especially when they are set at high graphics levels. During the game, experiencing lagging, frame loss, and high ping is not uncommon. Your gaming experience can be severely affected by various factors such as:

• Overheating.
• Insufficient disk storage space.
• Excessive fragmentation on the hard drive.
• Improper alignment of partitions.
• Installing games on HDDs instead of SSDs.

In the following sections, we will demonstrate five ways to optimize the hard drive for gaming to enhance performance. Let’s dive into it.

Method 1: Clean Up Hard Drives with MiniTool System Booster

When it comes to improving hard drive performance, MiniTool System Booster is a standout option because it allows you to speed up your computer by performing tasks such as cleaning up accumulated junk files in your system and browser, detecting and fixing common system errors, defragmenting your hard drives, and freeing up more available memory. Here’s how to use this PC tune-up software to optimize your hard drive for gaming.

Option 1: Thoroughly Scan Your Hard Drive

It’s recommended to carry out a comprehensive cleanup to slim down your disk. In this procedure, the Deepclean tool will sequentially run seven tasks to delete temporary files, empty the Recycle Bin, clean Windows Registries, and more.

Step 1. Launch MiniTool System Booster and access its main interface.

Step 2. Navigate to Performance Home and select Deepclean from the drop-down menu.

Step 3. Click on START CLEAN to run seven cleanup tasks in sequence:

• NetBooster – fine-tunes each internet setting or restores internet settings to speed up internet connection.
• Internet Cleanup – clears junk files in your browsers.
• Windows Cleanup – sweeps up temporary files, broken shortcuts, files in the Recycle Bin, and more.
• Registry Cleanup – cleans out invalid registry entries in your computer.
• Security Optimizer – finds and repairs vulnerabilities in your system.
• Program Accelerator – realigns program data and defragments files on your hard drive.
• Memory Mechanic – releases more available memory to increase the overall speed and stability of your computer.

Option 2: Disable Unnecessary Background Processes

As previously mentioned, most PC games consume a great deal of system resources, so you need to minimize the number of background processes to alleviate the strain on your hard drive, memory, CPU, and GPU. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1. Go to the Toolbox page and select Process Scanner.

Step 2. Click on Scan now and then view all the running background processes.

Step 3. Identify the resource-intensive ones and click the Terminate Process button next to them.

Option 3: Choose an Appropriate Power Plan

MiniTool System Booster provides several power modes to help you optimize performance and battery life while engaging in different activities. To optimize your SSD for gaming, switch to the Ultra Performance-Gaming mode:

Step 1. Go to the LiveBoost page.

Step 2. Under PowerSense, select Ultra Performance-Gaming from the drop-down menu.

Method 2: Transfer Games from HDD to SSD

It’s well-known that SSDs surpass HDDs in many aspects, so it’s advisable to move your games from HDD to SSD for better performance and quicker load times. Many game launchers permit you to move installed games from one drive to another without reinstalling them from scratch. Here, we’ll illustrate moving Steam games from HDD to SSD as an example:

Step 1. Open Steam > click on Steam in the top left corner > select Settings.

Step 2. In the Storage tab, click on your local drive and select Add Drive.

Step 3. In the Add a new Steam library folder window, pick a partition on your SSD and then click Add.

Step 4. Select the games you wish to move > click Move > choose the partition you added earlier in the Move Content window > click Move again to begin the process.

Method 3: Expand Game Drive Space

Modern PC games can be quite large, requiring substantial storage space. If you’re running out of storage space, expanding game drive space might be beneficial. MiniTool Partition Wizard is a great tool for this purpose as it allows you to resize, format, extend, and create partitions to help optimize your hard drive for gaming. Follow these steps:

Step 1. Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard.

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Step 2. In the right pane, select the partition where your games are installed.

Step 3. On the left-hand action panel, choose Extend Partition.

Step 4. Select the partition or unallocated space to take free space from. Drag the sliding handle leftwards or rightwards to specify how much free space you want to take. Click OK to proceed.

Step 5. After reviewing the changes you’ve made, click on Apply in the lower left corner to implement the changes.

Method 4: Implement 4K Alignment

If your partitions are improperly aligned, your computer’s performance may not be optimal even if you're using an SSD. To maximize your gaming drive’s performance, you can utilize the Align Partition or Align All Partitions feature in MiniTool Partition Wizard. Here’s how to run this feature to boost data access speed:

Step 1. In MiniTool Partition Wizard, select the disk you need to align.

Step 2. In the action panel, choose Align All Partitions.

Step 3. The program will notify you how many partitions need to be aligned.

Step 4. Click OK to proceed and then apply the changes you’ve made.

Method 5: Enable Write Caching

Enabling disk write caching might also enhance file transfer speed on your hard drive. Follow these steps:

Step 1. Type device manager in the Windows search bar and press Enter.

Step 2. Expand Disk drives and right-click on your hard drive or SSD for which you want to enable write caching and click on Properties.

Step 3. Go to the Policies tab and check Enable write caching on the device.

Step 4. Click OK and restart your computer to make the change effective.

Conclusion

These are all the details regarding how to optimize the hard drive for gaming on Windows 10/11. If you’re facing slow load times and noticeable delays while playing computer games, try these approaches and tools mentioned in this guide to extend partition, free up disk space, reduce defragmentation, align your partition, and more, which will make the most of your hard drive.

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