Latest on SSD settings on Win-10

Hi,

pparks1 said:

That is the whole point of this thread. General wisdom says don't defrag an SSD as you shorten it's life. We notice MS says it defrags, but it only happens once per month and only when System Restore is enabled.

The question now is, does this bother you?

My feeling is MS does it for a reason and I will get rid of my SSD long before it dies, so I don't care about extra write cycles. My oldest SSD is 7 years old and fine.

The reasons for not defragmenting SSDs are that increasing the number of writes to the memory cells will reduce their life and secondly, that ssds do not need it since there's hardly any latency, no moving parts.

While this is all very true, nowadays the cells can take much more writes than they used to.
Moreover, I see an awful lot of people objecting to defragmenting an ssd but on the other hand they don't mind restoring system images to it etc. every other month or so resulting in even more writes.
The logic is beyond me.

The question remains, why would MS defragment an ssd when "System Restore" is set to enabled but not when it is disabled ?
That does not make any sense to me at all unless there actually is a benefit in defragmenting a ssd or it just says it "defragments" but in reality it just retrims the ssd ?

In my experience there is but I haven't bothered to gather any proof of it. Ssds are still a tad too expensive (for me at least) to run such extensive tests on.

Cheers,

Hi,

Not mentioned yet, but worth noting, is the practice of "over provisioning". Leave space unused/unallocated to the system. The controller/software will use that as part of the reserve pool to greatly extend the life of the drive.

Quite a few modern SSds have "Overprovisioning" built in so to speak. It's set at the factory and taken care of by the drive's controller.
This is then totally invisible to the end user.

That said, it's good practice to find out if the manufacturer recommends setting "Overprovisioning" by the user or not.

In my experience most drives with capacities that are not multiples of say 128 Gb (256,512, etc.) but lower in capacity do not require the user to set it up. (e.g. 120 Gb, 240, 480, etc.)

Still, check it out first.

Cheers,

nkaufman said:

Hello,

Went through several posts and some external links on what to do for SSD drives under Windows-10 and it seems so confusing.

What is the latest thought on this matter?

Which services etc (if at all that is the case) need to be disabled?
Optimize - Should I enable this or disable? I normally do not use System Restore and that makes some difference on whether this works automatically every month.

Some think that Optimize does do a normal defrag every month (or at least that is what I got but could be mistaken as I was getting a bad headache going over this stuff ).

Have a unit with just one PCIe NVME and will be adding a spinner soon.

So, should I wait to add the spinner before running - winsat formal - to allow windows to set itself up properly?

Thanks for your assistance.

All I do is remove indexation on the drive.
The rest I trust Windows to handle.

f14tomcat said:

@pparks1

Why on earth would it bother me? What are you trying to say? What are you implying? Why does my question now become a concern for what may or may not bother me?

Think twice. Post once.

I was just summing up the jist of this thread. This behavior could bother some, and not bother others. It was a question for anybody who read this thread.

It was in no way directed to you, f14tomcat.

Hi there

The performance of SSD's are so superior to spinners or anything else - so why on earth bother to do anything with them at all -- just leave them be.

If you've got performance problems on your computer (with ? your computer !!) it's 100% certain - and I mean 100% certain that it won't be because of any problems with the SSD (unless it becomes inoperative of course).

SSD's have been out long enough now - the technology is tried and tested and they probably in normal use will outlast spinners.

We still don't have enough data on these for long term archive yet - but until recently the capacity of these was just too small - however with SSD's of the 500 GB and above sizes becoming more affordable to private / home users this topic will probably become of more interest.

As an extra = I've never found defragging a disk was ever worth it in over 30 years of using Windows -- just an image dump of the HDD, reformat and restore would work - and that ALWAYS was vastly quicker than any defragging.

I've got a VM testing running continuous image dumps and restores to an old SSD to see if I can wear it out -- been running for a few days !!!! runs a complete cycle in about 2 hrs. SSD still seems OK and was an early OCX one 120 GB. Image size is around 25 GB so a reasonable test "duty cycle".

Cheers

jimbo

Hi,

As an extra = I've never found defragging a disk was ever worth it in over 30 years of using Windows -- just an image dump of the HDD, reformat and restore would work - and that ALWAYS was vastly quicker than any defragging.

Faster? Possibly. But then it automatically defragments all data on the drive during the restore process anyway.

No clue why you'd want to reformat though.

People seem to think fragmentation on SSds is a non-issue but it all depends what you do with your device.
Same goes for "Overprovisioning" really. It really isn't required anymore on a home user PC.

Cheers,