Make Windows 10 realize USB 3.0 connected drive is an SSD, not an HDD.

Damn it actually worked, thanks! It seems to re-trim every unused sector every time you run it, but that's fine honestly, only takes a few seconds.

Code:

defrag D: /L /U /V
Microsoft Drive Optimizer
Copyright (c) 2013 Microsoft Corp.


Invoking retrim on data (D:)...




Performing pass 1:
        Retrim:  100% complete.


The operation completed successfully.


Post Defragmentation Report:


        Volume Information:
                Volume size                 = 698.50 GB
                Cluster size                = 4 KB
                Used space                  = 179.57 MB
                Free space                  = 698.33 GB


        Retrim:
                Backed allocations          = 698
                Allocations trimmed         = 696
                Total space trimmed         = 695.85 GB

Without defrag:

Code:

trimcheck.exe \\.\D: D:\ D:\trim.dat
Sectors per cluster: 8
Bytes per sector: 512
Number of free clusters: 183063403
Total number of clusters: 183110399
Testing TRIM with file 'D:\trim.dat'
ExtentCount: 1
StartingVcn: 0
NextVcn: 1
Lcn: 41
Volume file type: 1 (0)
Old file pointer: 167936
New file pointer: 167936
61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68
Press any key to continue . . .
61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

With defrag:

Code:

trimcheck.exe \\.\D: D:\ D:\trim.dat
Sectors per cluster: 8
Bytes per sector: 512
Number of free clusters: 183063403
Total number of clusters: 183110399
Testing TRIM with file 'D:\trim.dat'
ExtentCount: 1
StartingVcn: 0
NextVcn: 1
Lcn: 41
Volume file type: 1 (0)
Old file pointer: 167936
New file pointer: 167936
61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68
Press any key to continue . . .
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

So it actually works. (This program just writes a new file with this pattern into exactly one cluster, opens the volume directly, seeks to the file location, reads the cluster directly from the volume, waits for you to TRIM, and then reads the cluster again.)

Thanks a lot man! The only question that remains is why Windows doesn't realize this by default, but oh well maybe it'll get fixed eventually.

Sorry for bringing up an old thread, but this is one of the top hits on Google and I hope this info can help someone else.
This really helped me a lot, so thank you so much Cliff S and mikohana!

TL;DR: Even if your SSD is shown as an HDD in the "Optimise Drives" GUI, you might be able to retrim it using the "Optimise" button. It worked for me. No need to run the command line (not everyone is comfortable with this).


The "long" story:
My external SSD showed as a HDD in Windows 8 "Optimise Drives".
I used the command defrag X: /L /U /V
And behold! It worked. It said "Invoking retrim on ..." and everything in the console.

I had the "Optimise Drives" GUI window open in the background, and noticed that it started showing the progress when I ran the command in the console. It specifically said "xx% trimmed".
So when it was done, I tried to click the "Optimise" button in the GUI, and this time it also said "xx% trimmed".

Bonus info: I did this on a completely empty partition, and it took 10-20 seconds (for 350 GB). I figure that an actual defragmentation would have taken less than a second, since there were no files to defrag.

So maybe try the command line version once to see if it works (since there might be other reasons preventing trimming from working), then just use the GUI afterwards; and trust that the regularly running optimizations is also doing retrim.

Or if you are not comfortable using command line, just try using the GUI and see if it starts trimming rather than defragmenting.