Windows 10: Latest on SSD settings on Win-10

I understand all that. I'm not sure what your point is.

 

Hi,

Bottom line is MS ought to distinguish between optimizing (SSD) and defragmenting (HDD).


Most of the stuff on the internet about what you can and can't do with SSds is really outdated.

If I see a SSD that is really fragmented I will defragment it. It is faster after that.


Cheers, *Wink

 

Not meaning to sound like I'm dragging this out, but how do you actually defrag an SSD? Windows defrag does a trim. 3rd party I've seen won't offer to defrag, just trim. Honestly, I really don't know how to.

 

Hi,

Wise Disk Cleaner is what I use for that.

I'll look into it but it might be possible to force defrag.exe to run a defrag on an SSD from the command line.

On the servers we use Condusiv Technologies' (formerly Diskeeper) which really makes a big difference.

Cheers, *Wink

 

According to the sources quoted in the links, Windows defrag (or Optimise drives or whatever it's called now) does not just do a trim, if you have system restore switched on.

 

Thanks, guys. I'll have to look into that. I was always under the impression that a TRUE defrag was poison to an SSD.

 

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.

 

@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.

 

Hi,

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, *Wink

 

Exactly. I really believe the words are very misleading. Trimming is basically erasing unused memory cells in bulk so that write requests don't have to delete/erase/write...just write. Fortunately, good backup/restore software (i.e. Macrium, and others) will issue a bulk trim command prior to restoring. 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. Why the System Restore connection? Beats me. I have it turned off.

 

Hi,

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, *Wink

 

To add to @NavyLCDR post above, the inbuilt defrag tool does detect SSDs and will regularly schedule TRIM cleanup.

 

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

 

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