Windows Defrag schedule / SSD maintenance query

Hi,

stealth2920 said:

I have mine turned off. I thought SSD's didn't need to be defragged at all. Is the optimize setting different than defrag? I'm confused.

Defragmentation and Optimization:

All drives suffer from files being split into different locations on a drive regardless what type of drive. This can become somewhat cumbersome on typical spinners because the heads need to travel to read these blocks causing latency.
SSDs being so much faster, suffering hardly any latency at all, do not require defragmentation but do require garbage collection, i.e. cells that contain deleted or no longer used information need to be cleared and flagged as clean so these can be rewritten to.
That's what "Optimization" does in Windows on an SSD. When on a HDD it will defrag instead.

While you can defrag an SSD it causes quite a lot of writes on the drive which reduces its life. No big deal as modern SSDs can sustain an enormous amount of writes.
But, given the low inherent latency of these SSDs, why bother ?

Some people claim to never ever defrag their HDDs but instead restore an image of it. While this achieve the same end result it also rewrites everything on their drive instead of just reallocating the fragmented files. Not very disk friendly if you ask me even though they think otherwise....

There's loads of BS on the net so don't believe everything you read but try to understand how SSD and their controllers works. After that, decide what best suits your needs.
I'll be dilapidated for it but, yes, I do defragment SSDs occasionally....

Cheers,

fdegrove said:

Hi,




Defragmentation and Optimization:

All drives suffer from files being split into different locations on a drive regardless what type of drive. This can become somewhat cumbersome on typical spinners because the heads need to travel to read these blocks causing latency.
SSDs being so much faster, suffering hardly any latency at all, do not require defragmentation but do require garbage collection, i.e. cells that contain deleted or no longer used information need to be cleared and flagged as clean so these can be rewritten to.
That's what "Optimization" does in Windows on an SSD. When on a HDD it will defrag instead.

While you can defrag an SSD it causes quite a lot of writes on the drive which reduces its life. No big deal as modern SSDs can sustain an enormous amount of writes.
But, given the low inherent latency of these SSDs, why bother ?

Some people claim to never ever defrag their HDDs but instead restore an image of it. While this achieve the same end result it also rewrites everything on their drive instead of just reallocating the fragmented files. Not very disk friendly if you ask me even though they think otherwise....

There's loads of BS on the net so don't believe everything you read but try to understand how SSD and their controllers works. After that, decide what best suits your needs.
I'll be dilapidated for it but, yes, I do defragment SSDs occasionally....

Cheers,

Thanks for the info. I will just leave it turned on and let windows 10 do whatever. It is now set at default so it optimizes the SSD's once a week.

I clean installed W10 onto an SSD and can confirm that the weekly schedule doesn't update as expected. I deliberately left it once and found that one partition that stores Macrium images (and so gets filled/deleted/filled/deleted) did eventually auto run after something like 20 days despite the partition being used daily for storing very large files (20Gb at a time plus sets of 0.2 to 2Gb).

I consider it a bug in Windows operation in the same way the system reserved partition always reports as needing optimising.

I think it depends on the manufacture. I have a couple of Samsung SSD's and they explicitly state that Defrag should be off. The reason being is that they supply a software component "Samsung Magician", that optimizes the drive and I assume it performs the trim function when required.

I still can't understand why does defrag utility needs to TRIM SSDs when TRIM is enabled?
Does this means that TRIM isn't always sent when deleting files?
In my case it sometimes says Needs optimization

Hi,

derek10 said:

I still can't understand why does defrag utility needs to TRIM SSDs when TRIM is enabled?
Does this means that TRIM isn't always sent when deleting files?
In my case it sometimes says Needs optimization

Defragmenting is used for HDD, not SSDs.
Optimization is sending a RETRIM command. It will say "Needs Optimization" for a number of reasons one of them being that the machine has seen not enough idle time for the OS to optimize the SSD in the background.
Another being that optimization has not been run yet on a new drive or volume for instance.

Cheers,