Virtually all the defragmenters I ever tried report different percentage and defragment in different way. And another thing, every time you do full disk defragmentation, that disk had a workout like if you erased it and returned contents on it. It may be equivalent of moths of normal usage. Overdoing it can shorten HDD life considerably.
What are all your thoughts on this?
Windows Does Defragment SSDs, But Its Okay
You just don't want to overdo actual full defragmentation of SDDs because of their limited writes capacity. If it is defragged fully, once or twice, I'm sure some nerd out there has calculated how many terabytes of writes that is compared to the 75 TB or 150 TB or whatever TB write lifetime of your SSD is. This is not the outlandish concern it was when SSDs first came out but it's still the case that you don't want to squander your finite budget of lifetime writes on unnecessary writes like you could get away with (and enriching 3rd party defragger sales too) on HDDs. In addition, but more importantly in the short term, it could probably do much worse by plugging up the file structures and overqueueing TRIM requirements to where it severely impacts functionality, depending on how much fragment consolidation and movement is needed. And "need" is an operative word here, where the "needs" of an SSD are quite different from the "needs" of an HDD.
Windows "Optimize Drives" tool - note they don't use the word defragment any more - will treat your SSD appropriately by doing trims as scheduled and, as necessary if you have system restore enabled, a limited amount of defragmentation on a monthly basis.
You can read the good article on this by Scot Hanselman by following the "Source" link in Halasz' next to last sentence of post # 3.
That article plays off of Hanselman's article. I read the lifehacker one some time back and don't recall I thought much other than, oh, they're building off Hanselman.
P.S. - I had my salad years with many 3rd party defragmenters, both paid and free, and eventually came to the conclusion I was just spending money and/or time more or less playing a video game and didn't really see a real world benefit from all the endless defragmenting, i.e., that a weekly or even monthly auto defrag/optimization by Windows' built-in tool was more than sufficient - and still is, for HDD or SSD either one.
So... let Windows 10 defrag the SSD once per month, because the W10 Defrag knows how to defrag the SSD drives correctly? So I can set an auto schedule for W10 to defrag the SDD once per month?
I think default set up is weekly in the Windows tool and I have left mine that way with no ill effect I can see - I assume that 3 times out of 4.33 (weeks in a month) it is only doing a TRIM. The monthly frequency Hanselman talks about is for that special limited defragmentation Windows may do on an SSD and I don't know if that frequency can be changed or varies as needed for something extraordinary going on with the SSD.
If I do a large movement of files or had to do a restore for some reason, I may opt to just pull up the Optimize Drives tool and run it manually just to catch up on TRIMs it may benefit from.
P.S. - I just wouldn't use the word "defrag" too much any more when talking about SSDs because it seems to set a lot of people's hair on fire...
When I set up my desktop last year, upon returning to the US, I did basically the same thing. I added a 3 Terabyte (partitioned) drive as my secondary drive. If I had it to do over again, I would have made the secondary drive a SSD as well. The SSD drive has to wait for the platter drive to spin up. Live and learn.
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>> Power Options >> Change plan settings >> change advanced power settings >> change settings currently unavailable >> High Performance >> and turn off "Link state Power Management" under PCI Express, and under Hard Disk set "Turn off hard disk after" to never.
