Calling SSD users. What does your 'Optimise' window show ?

Mooly · 17 Feb 2017

I've got my SSD set to optimise daily and I'm puzzled by the results. Previously I had it set to 'weekly' and nothing seemed to happen there either.

Is this a glitch in the W10 GUI ? or is the SSD firmware overriding Windows and doing its own thing.

Is there any registry key that shows when it was last run, and/or when it will run next ? Vista used to have such a thing for defragging boot files as I recall. You could look and see when it was last done.

Just puzzled that's all.

Calling SSD users. What does your 'Optimise' window show ?-optimise.jpg

AddRAM · 17 Feb 2017

You should not be optimizing a ssd, it does it on it`s own.

It`s supposed to be turned off on a ssd, totally normal.

You should turn off the schedule and optimize your hard drives manually, too much of that can kill a hard drive or even create bad sectors.

This is a brand new install I just did, that`s why all my drives say never run, but they were defragmented from W7 so there`s no need to optimize them now, I`ll do it on 10 when I get to it :)

Edward · 17 Feb 2017

Same here it happened to me so I turn off optimized drive automatically and now I use Samsung Magician to Trim manually.

Mooly · 17 Feb 2017

Thanks folks :)

As I understand it, defragmenting is the thing that is neither needed nor recommended for SSD, but trimming or optimising definitely is as it speeds up writing to previously used sectors that have been marked as available for use.

My W10 install was clean installed onto an SSD and so no defragmentation option or even graphical display of fragmentation is available.

I'm surprised nothing has altered in the GUI because the last couple of weeks have seen me doing a huge amount of work that generates temp files as high as 10 to 15 Gb (yes Gb) and hundred of smaller files that keep getting shuffled and altered/deleted.

NavyLCDR · 17 Feb 2017

The way a modern SSD works is like this. The firmware of the SSD will perform the trim function when it deems it is necessary to do so. I do not have any idea what the specifications for a firmware initiated trim are and I suspect that would be different from model to model. What the Windows SSD optimization does is send the signal to the SSD firmware to initiate the trim function manually.

I see two things, IMHO. 1. The SSD firmware is more than likely going to keep the SSD running in the optimum condition by doing trim when it necessary to do so. 2. I agree, the scheduling function within Windows 10 for sending the signal to do the trim operation to the SSD on a time scheduled basis does appear to be broken. I do not think that this will affect SSD performance in any noticeable way due to the SSD firmware taking care of it anyway.

Excessive "trimming" of the SSD will do no harm because each cell must be "trimmed" - reset - before it can be written to again anyway. The only thing that excessive "trimming" can affect is that if the SSD is busy with the trimming operation on a cell, it cannot read data from another cell during that operation so if the trim operation is occurring during a period of heavy read/write operation such as transferring a large file, it will affect performance.

BTW, my Windows optimization screen shows 11 days since SSD optimization even though the frequency is set to weekly.

This is interesting, though. My SSD dashboard program has an option to enable Windows trim or not. When I just loaded the program, the box was not checked. I manually checked it:

Calling SSD users. What does your 'Optimise' window show ?-capture.jpg

Mooly · 17 Feb 2017

Thanks for the explanation and info :) You seem to be confirming that there is a 'bug' in the way the W10 interfaces reports the status. I haven't any 3rd party SSD management tools installed but yes (lol) that is confusing on your set up. And just seeing your screen shot and 'task scheduler' getting a mention led to me turning this up. Just one of many In know and how true it all is I don't know.

Why Windows 10, 8.1 and 8 defragment your SSD and how you can avoid this – Вадим Стеркин

AddRAM · 18 Feb 2017

As stated by Navy a ssd may or may not have it`s own software program.

And it`s also a good idea to set aside some unallocated space.

Mooly · 18 Feb 2017

Thanks. I do have a small amount of unallocated space, more by accident than design as I like to see round numbers for partition sizes as viewed in file explorer.

wen · 18 Feb 2017

AddRAM said:

As stated by Navy a ssd may or may not have it`s own software program.

And it`s also a good idea to set aside some unallocated space.

AddRAM , Why do you have Rapid Mode OFF ??

Cliff S · 18 Feb 2017

OS AWARENESS VS DRIVE AWARENESS
In an HDD system, the Operating System (OS) can simply request that new data be written to the same location where the older, now invalid data, is stored, and the HDD will directly overwrite the old data. In an SSD, however, the page must first be erased before it can be written to locations previously holding data the SSD cannot directly overwrite existing data as stated earlier. The OS understands the files, their structure, and the logical locations where they are stored, but does not understand the physical storage structure of the storage device. In any storage system, the storage device doesn’t know the file structure it simply knows that there are bytes of data written in specific sectors. The storage system, whether SSD or HDD, returns the data from physical locations when the OS asks for data in the corresponding logical locations. When the OS deletes the file, it simply marks the space used for that data as free in its logical data table. With HDDs, the OS does not need to tell the storage device anything about the deletion because it would simply write something new into that same physical location in the future. In the case of an SSD, it only becomes aware that the data is deleted (or invalid) when the OS tries to write to that location again. At that time the SSD marks the old data as invalid and it writes the new data to a new physical location. It may also perform GC at that same time, but that varies between SSD architectures and other conditions at that moment.

Garbage Collection and TRIM in SSDs Explained - An SSD Primer | The SSD Review

THE TRIM COMMAND
In newer operating systems, e.g., Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Linux 2.6.33, FreeBSD 8.2, Open Solaris, Mac OS X Lion, the TRIM command enables the OS to notify the SSD that old data is no longer valid about the time it deletes the logical block addresses from its logical table. The advantage of the TRIM command is that it enables the SSD’s GC to skip the invalid data rather than moving it, thus saving time not rewriting the invalid data. This results in a reduction of the number of erase cycles on the flash memory and enables higher performance during writes. The SSD doesn’t need to immediately delete or garbage collect these locations it just marks them as no longer valid.

bla
bla
bla

This produces three key benefits:

Lower write amplification. Less data is re-written and more free space is available during GC (more space to write equals fewer writes needed);
Higher throughput. With the TRIM command, there is less data to move during GC and the drive runs faster. Throughput is bottlenecked at the flash an SSD is only as fast as it can write to the flash memory. During the time it is doing GC, the drive has to stop some of the data transfer from the host while it moves data around. This is why it’s beneficial for the SSD to know which data is invalid so it doesn’t have to be moved during GC.
Improved endurance, because the drive is writing less to the flash by not rewriting invalid data.

Garbage Collection and TRIM in SSDs Explained - An SSD Primer | The SSD Review

Best is to read the entire article