Fix "Optimization Not Available" in Optimize Drives in Windows

[harlan4096]

Microsoft's Windows operating system runs maintenance tasks including disk analysis and defragmention regularly on its own.

Most Windows users and administrators don't need to run these manually anymore, but there are cases where you'd like to do so.

I checked Optimize Drives recently and discovered that Windows refused to run on two of the hard drives. Windows displayed "Optimization not available" as the status, "unknown" as the media type, and "never run" as the last run date and time.

You can access the Optimize Drives tool by right-clicking on a drive in Explorer, selecting Properties from the context menu, and opening Tools > Optimize.

The analyze and optimize buttons could not be used in the window as they were not active. My first assumption was that this might have something to do with encryption, as both volumes were encrypted and only mounted when I needed to access data on them.

Two solutions came to my mind: try the command line version of defrag to see if it would work, or use third-party defragmentation software like Smart Defrag, Vopt, Defraggler or Live Defrag. I decided to try the command line tool defrag first as it is a first-party solution.

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