Windows 10: Do I need to defrag Windows 10?

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... *Wink

 

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.

 

Throw in an older, IDE HDD in the mix and slow boot takes on another meaning !!

 

Right click *Start >> 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.

 

De-fragmentation of a SSD is useless by design. Fragmentation is only an issue of HDDs where the reading/writing head has to move all over the disks in order to "collect" the different parts that together build your data (e.g. the audio files of an album). De-fragmentation does the following: It "collects" the different parts of your data and rearranges them so they are stored subsequently on the disks meaning the head does not have to move that much in order to read out the data which leads to faster reading speeds.

For an SSD on the other hand fragmentation is not an issue. It reads fragmented data just as fast as not fragmented data. So besides reducing the SSD's lifetime de-fragmentation would also be completely useless.

SSD's have another issue though. They can write onto the entire storage but they can only delete entire blocks (can't remember the exact details right now but you can google it, just look up trim on Wikipedia). That's what trim is for. So what happens is with time there are a lot of incomplete blocks on your SSD, partially filled with valid data, partially filled with data marked for deletion. But that data cannot be physically deleted because the blocks still contain valid data. Now trim comes into play and rearranges the data so all the valid data is stored in a way it fills up as much entire blocks as possible, leading to the "marked for deletion" data also filling up entire blocks. And now those entire blocks can finally be physically deleted making room for new data.

In short words: De-fragmentation of SSDs does nothing useful but (in theory) destroys your drive.

 

On HDDs, some of what may appear to be fragmentation is by design. Some programs (MS Office, data bases etc.) leave empty blocks at the end of data files so those files could be expanded linearly and so speed up their loading and writing to. Windows usually report less of fragmentation than other, third party defrag programs because partly of that.

 

But, as has been discussed earlier in the thread, it's not as simple as that: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRea...ntYourSSD.aspx

I think we need to draw a finer distinction on this thinking, that's exactly why "defrag" and SSD in the same sentence seems so inflammatory.

 

I think it's more down to comparing defragmentation on mechanical HDDs and SSDs, it's not the same thing.

 

Totally agreed - and also a little a bit, when it comes to what's needed for optimization side of things, newer SSDs versus older SSDs and new OS's versus older OS's.

 

Word of Caution Based On An Experience This Week...

I've used a third party defragmenter called Piriform Defraggler without any trouble for 5 years with Windows 7 home P.C.s.

After upgrading from Win7 to Win10 on one P.C., it worked very sluggishly, even though I had Win10's built in defragmenter turned off. But, it got the job done of moving video files to the end of the drive, which is why I liked it so much.

Two nights ago, I ran the "Boot Time Defrag" function. The PC shut down, restarted, started defragging the (? can't think of what they're called) files and then the Win10 O.S. locked up with a black screen for hours. Tried every fix I could find here in the forum and on the internet. Finally had to totally erase and reinstall using the original 2010 Win-7 O.S. that came with this HP desktop. Five years of "stuff", all gone. But, upgrading back to Win10 was easier and there were no conflicts along the way, or since upgrading. Took an entire day though.

So what's the lesson from this story? Stay away from any application that isn't Win10 certified by the vendor? Maybe that's not even enough, because a quick check of Defraggler - Download indicates that Defraggler IS Win10 certified. At any rate...just be careful! If a program acts "strange" on Windows10, it could be the prelude to something very unfortunate coming your way.

 

Hi,

I take it this was on a HDD not a SSD ?
Either way, running boot time defragmentation to defrag the MFT and pagefile is ALWAYS a risk and the defragmentation software should warn you about that.
Oh, and if that drive is a GPT one you can bet your life on it that you're going to be in trouble doing a boot time defrag with most defrag software.

Sorry to hear the worst happened to you but I'm sure this has nothing to do with Win 10, this can happen on any OS really.

And no, you should not run a defragmentation program that's not SSD aware on a SSD. It's useless and other than wearing the drive out unnecessarily it won't bring you any advantage whatsoever.
SSDs rely on TRIM, Garbage Collection and in most cases (bar the Sandforce controllers) on over provisioning to keep house and that's all taken care of by both the OS (provided it supports TRIM) and the drive's controller logic.
SSDs that still require over provisioning come with part of the capacity set aside to do exactly that, bar some really old ones, you don't need to set aside a chunk of the drive for that, it's all take care of out of the box so to speak.

Cheers, *Wink

 

Hi,

That very much depends on how the defragmentation software is designed. I.e. it should prevent fragmentation to begin with and then we're talking.
That said my favourite one no longer runs on Win 10 and I use only SSD now anyhow.
Still, under W7 and below it worked great on both HDD and SSD just the same. I sorely miss it.

But saying that W10 does no longer benefit from defragmentation ? Really ?

Cheers, *Wink