JJ Menning, I had no difficulty installing it in an alternative drive/directory.

JJ Menning, you probably already had this installed on the system drive from a previous giveaway and forgot about it and this install over the top picked up the existing install path and reused it and therefore did not offer you the installer form for setting a custom install path. IF that turns out to be the case, to migrate the next installation of this to a new path you'd need to uninstall the existing copy and the re-installation should offer the option to install into a custom location/drive letter.

TK, you are correct that I had an earlier version installed in a non- Root drive but did know about it. When I installed the newer version from GOTD, the installer notified me that a previous version was already installed and it had to be uninstalled before the newest version could be installed. So I thought to myself, great, this means the new version installer will know where in the non-Root drive to put the new version, as many other later version program installers had done. Sadly, IObit ignored that location data and instead installed the program to C:\Program Files (x86)\IObit\Smart Defrag. But, it was smart enough to read the drive data from the previous version and make that the default in the new version. Very disappointing.

Open up Windows [File] Explorer, right click a disk drive or USB stick drive letter, go to the 2nd tab in the Properties popup [Tools], click the Optimize button, and every partition should appear in the list with a description that'll tell you if it's an SSD. Note: some USB external SSDs may show as a regular hard disk, and USB sticks may show up as hard disks too, for some reason.

shreeshaj, Their Free Version works just as well and updates to the Latest Free Version.
Also, unlike Windows Defragger offers the option to Analyze your SSD.
And, you don't need to be concerned about a 6 mo. licence.
Although this will probably revert to the Free Version when it's time is up.

Chris, Hard disk. Normally something like this is called "optimization of the hard drives".

In response to [ Chris ] suggesting this does nothing special:

- it trims SSD,
- definitely speeds up responsiveness on HDD for me,
- deletes a whole list of unwanted files,
- pre-windows boot defrag
- free

The pro version, free today, also
- turns on more responsive DMA for HDD that don't already have it,
- can schedule auto defrag
- can auto update itself

- - - - - - - - - -

Recommendations for improvement:

- put directories in alphabetical order at track zero
( these are responsiveness enhancing features from the original Norton DS DirSort and SD SpeedDIsk ).

- do NOT load anything TSR terminate and stay resident, we have to fund and turn off background IObit nag programs.

- - - - - - - - - -

Keep at it, IObit, you have some great utilities, getting better all the time.
.

Just FWIW, with a conventional hard disk, data closer to the start of the partition can be read faster than data towards the end of the partition. There are all sorts of strategies regarding what should be placed for optimum speed -- I'm pretty sure iObit's is different from Auslogics' for example. Win10's Optimization OTOH doesn't bother with that sort of thing, *BUT*, if you want to pack everything at the start of the partition so you can shrink the partition, or compact an expanding VHD, Win10 **may** move some files for you that 3rd party defrag apps will not.

Also FWIW, if your running an SSD, Do NOT turn off Win10's automatic optimization on a schedule... To work properly with Windows Microsoft says SSDs do need to have defrag performed every so often.

Peter Blaise, I have not seen any system since windows 3.1 that did not have DMA or more recently UDMA transfer mode enabled by default! Only time it is not enabled by default is if there has been determined to be a hardware fault and attempts to use UDMA on a particular chipset is known to result in excessive UDMA transfer errors or the cable is faulty. In those cases forcing UDMA to be on will either be ignored by the drivers or result in a fundamentally unstable system.

I would not want a defragmentation utility to delete files! That is the job of a clean up utility not a defragmentation tool!

reTRIMing an SSD periodically is nothing special Windows 10 already scheduled defragmenter does that in the background along with periodic background defragmenting of conventional hard drives.

There was a time when 3rd party defragmenters were needed (windows 95 etc) as windows did not have one built in... Once Microsoft created the defragmentation API for Windows NT 3rd party defragmenters became both mostly surplus to any real requirement to exist and stupidly easy to knock up since they ALL use Microsoft defragmentation API.

For placement of large or infrequently accessed file types that are best moved to the slow end of a conventional HDD I use defraggler but after the files I want at the slow end of the drive are at the slow end of the drive and the operating system files are at the faster portion of the drive I prefer to let windows defragmenter optimise the boot sequence and OS files. In most cases if there are copious amounts of physical RAM the system cache of the file systems will negate much of the advantages of extreme optimisation of file and folder entry physical locations on a drives platter.