I have ONE drive (USB) that consistently raises in temp at various times. I have a separate defrag program and it specifically EXCLUDES all USB drives - and I explicitly excluded it as well. Only the one seems to do this. Any ideas?
Windows will regularly defrag all disks seen as internal (not removable). Method is different for normal disks vs. SSD. But there are also other activities that can raise a drive's temperature while being seemingly idle: - Automatic garbage collection, e. g. TRIM command for SSD and SMR-HDD - Automatic SMART surface check during idle (called Offline test) - Idle virus check by the A/V - Check for temporary/trash files by Storage sense or cleanmgr
USB drives that are not HDD are automatically excluded from defrag, like SSD or Pendrive, so you don't have to do anything special.
You probably don't need this if you have an SSD. However, if you have that and many regular drives and sometimes experience a slowdown which disappears when you do a manual defrag, then this might help. Run Task Scheduler, then go to the Microsoft - Windows - Defrag folder. You'll see a ScheduledDefrag entry if you set a schedule in the Defrag program. The problem is that defrag will usually run if there's nothing else running. If you have some software that does, then it will think that the system isn't busy and thus will not defrag. To fix that, create a new task in the same folder and copy the settings of the one made by Windows, making sure that you have the ff. in each tab setting: General - change the user to system, check "run with the highest privileges", and configure for Windows 10 Triggers - set the schedule that you want Actions - run the program %windir%\system32\defrag.exe with the ff. arguments: -c -h -o -$ Conditions - uncheck everything except for power if you're using a laptop The system will defrag one disk at a time during the schedule given. Any SSDs will only be trimmed. You can right-click and run the task to see if it works. Run the defrag program and you'll see that it is defragmenting one drive at a time. You can also right-click and disable the task if you wish.