CCleaner Tip

I hadn't noticed the feature before. I can't see how it could improve performance but it could be a very useful tool if you wanted to handover an operational computer with sensitive deleted files wiped.
Its security options are
Simple overwrite (1 pass)
DOD
NSA
Gutmann
That looks pretty good to me.
Thanks Roderunner.

Sandforce based SSD drives get slow over time, and this can be fixed by writing 0s to the entire drive. Of course, you have to move everything off of the drive first, which is annoying if it's your OS drive. This is the only use of freespace wipe, I have ever heard of as far as performance enhancement goes. This would not be using a method like NSA, DoD, or Gutman, since you only want to write 0 once so as to not shorten the life of the drive.

Personally I think that if more folks made use of some encryption and file wiping, perhaps hackers would be less inclined to snoop around in the first place.

Good freespace wipe tools also wipe the MFT records and flie slacks. Before I take a backup image of the OS, I do a CClean and registry clean to get rid of temporary junk, remove the page file, do a freespace wipe to blow out all of the MFT, and then defrag/optimize. This keeps the image small and clean.

LMHmedchem

If you noticed performance improvement it was likely from the defrag with optimize you did. You may also have had a ton of disk and reg items which CCleaner cleaned up - sometimes I find 4-5 gb of schmutz and 2-300 Reg shells. Wiping the disk space they occupied isn't a factor.

After ten years I advanced from free Auslogics Disk and Reg Defraggers to the new Puran free defragger with it's Intelligent Optimizer enabled on the Additonal Operations tab. This is the only boot-time defrag with an optmiizer, which moves most-used files to the outer edge of HD where they can be read faster. This provides a performance boost, especially on older HD's.

gregrocker said:

This is the only boot-time defrag with an optmiizer, which moves most-used files to the outer edge of HD where they can be read faster. This provides a performance boost, especially on older HD's.

I didn't know that! A very useful feature.
But a clash with the inbuilt Windows defrag is a potential issue.

I like the reference to "older HDDs"

That's where I notice the difference. But it could be boot-time defrag which gets System files that are running otherwise.

Cluberti clued me to this when we had a Dell laptop with 2 minute startup for which the Boot Trace indicated HD R/W congestion, and a boot-time defrag cut boot time in half.

So it works.