Is defrag really off on my SSD?

[Metaluna]

I have an Intel SSD as my boot drive (Win7 Pro x64). Though I have scheduled defrag turned off (I verified this by checking the Task Scheduler), Event Viewer shows that defrag is running on my C: drive at 8PM every night. I'm not sure if it's doing a full defrag or just an Analyze Disk, but either way, WTF? It only seems to be happening on C:, not my data drives.

Are there other scheduled tasks that call defrag? I do have some third party apps installed that schedule various tasks (Acronis True Image, Windows Home Server Connector, Norton Internet Security, Nero, etc.) but I don't see them running anything around the time period that defrag runs (at least nothing that shows up in Event Viewer). Is there any way to figure out from the Event Viewer data what process or service called defrag?

 

[Burner27]

Go into services (At a run box, type: services.msc then hit enter)

Find the disk defragmenter service, right click on it and choose stop (if it is started). Double click on service and set the Startup type to DISABLED.

 

[dugn]

Go into services (At a run box, type: services.msc then hit enter)

Find the disk defragmenter service, right click on it and choose stop (if it is started). Double click on service and set the Startup type to DISABLED.

Bad advice - especially if you have non-SSD drives on your system.

Go to Disk Defragmenter (go to Start Orb | Programs | ?? | System Tools | Disk Defragmenter). Make sure that the defragmenter dialog shows that your SSD's Last Run is 'Never' and that your other disks are being defragmented automatically. If it shows a Last Run time other than 'Never' your SSD isn't reporting its spindle speed correctly to Win7 so it knows it's an SSD. Check your brand's support site to see if others have the issue and how they solved it.

Otherwise, you should see 'Never' by your SSD's Last Run time and be good to go.

 

[Burner27]

Even though he has Non-SSD drives in his machine, it's not 'bad advice'. There have been many people who have done what you suggest and find out that Win7 still attempts to defrag the SSD. Better safe than sorry. Even if the service is set to manual you still can run the risk of shortening the life of your SSD. If you are counting on Win7 to ensure it will only defrag non-ssd drives with your suggestions, then you have more faith in microsoft than many people. Defragging is not as important as it was with previous versions of Windows BTW.

I would only run the service when you need to do a defrag. I would have it disabled at all other times.

 

[Metaluna]

I do have some non-SSD drives in the system, but I'll disable the service and see if that helps.

dugn, I did also go into System Tools->Disk Defragmenter, and the Last Run time there agreed with what I saw in the event log (i.e. 8PM every night). I also verified that auto scheduling was turned off completely (I actually did this yesterday...I've been fighting this for a couple of days now) What's really wierd is that even when you do turn on auto schedule, it defaults to something like 1AM, so I don't know where the 8PM schedule is coming from. I'll research my motherboard a bit and see if there are any known issues with this. I did notice on the last bios update that my Intel AHCI bios got updated from 1.1x to 1.20. It's a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P with the SSD on the ICH10R controller and AHCI enabled (using the MS drivers).

 

[dugn]

Even though he has Non-SSD drives in his machine, it's not 'bad advice'. There have been many people who have done what you suggest and find out that Win7 still attempts to defrag the SSD. Better safe than sorry. Even if the service is set to manual you still can run the risk of shortening the life of your SSD. If you are counting on Win7 to ensure it will only defrag non-ssd drives with your suggestions, then you have more faith in microsoft than many people. Defragging is not as important as it was with previous versions of Windows BTW.

I would only run the service when you need to do a defrag. I would have it disabled at all other times.

Fair to disagree then. I still think compromising the speed of resident HDDs by universally disabling the defrag service to reduce impact on the SSD is a bad idea. Even fully stocked with cells that need an erase and refresh before writing data on an SSD makes it still much, much faster than HDDs. Even the argument that the cells will eventually burn out from overuse seems too skittish since the lifespan of SSD cells is about the same as the magnetic tolerances of today's HDDs. In fact, an SSD is just as likely to last as long as an HDD - whether the failure comes by bad sectors or catastrophic failure.

Defragging is actually just as important in Windows 7 as it was in previous Windows versions. I'm not sure where the contention that somehow Windows 7-managed disks are less likely to incur the penalty of fragmentation than previous Windows versions.

And in this specific area, I have a great deal of faith in MSFT.

I have an Intel SSD as my boot drive (Win7 Pro x64). Though I have scheduled defrag turned off (I verified this by checking the Task Scheduler), Event Viewer shows that defrag is running on my C: drive at 8PM every night. I'm not sure if it's doing a full defrag or just an Analyze Disk, but either way, WTF? It only seems to be happening on C:, not my data drives.

Are there other scheduled tasks that call defrag? I do have some third party apps installed that schedule various tasks (Acronis True Image, Windows Home Server Connector, Norton Internet Security, Nero, etc.) but I don't see them running anything around the time period that defrag runs (at least nothing that shows up in Event Viewer). Is there any way to figure out from the Event Viewer data what process or service called defrag?

There are no other Windows tasks that would call defrag other than the Windows' scheduled task usually set to run weekly (Wednesdays) at 1AM by default. If it's another time or frequency, something (another app) has changed things. And it's not WHS's fault - it doesn't reorganize files on the client or trigger defrags.

Check what Windows has scheduled (Start Orb | ... | System Tools | Task Scheduler | Microsoft --> Windows --> Defrag) and if its at another time than what Task Scheduler shows (as I suspect), it's not Windows doing the defrag call. You'll need to hunt down the culprit. Although it's not catastrophic to defrag an SSD, it's highly undesireable. Your mention of an 8am start time makes me suspect something other than Windows.

If the Windows Defrag task is set for the time you're getting the undesired defrag, then it is, indeed, Windows. If that's the case, send me an MSINFO32 to my [H] forum name with @microsoft.com on the end and I'll look into it.

I hope that helps...

 

[Lateralus]

Fair to disagree then. I still think compromising the speed of resident HDDs by universally disabling the defrag service to reduce impact on the SSD is a bad idea.

If he's that concerned about Windows defragging the SSD even though it's not supposed to, he could always disable the service and use a 3rd party tool to defrag just the mechanical drives.

 

[Metaluna]

If he's that concerned about Windows defragging the SSD even though it's not supposed to, he could always disable the service and use a 3rd party tool to defrag just the mechanical drives.

This is what I ended up doing. I already had a license for Raxco PerfectDisk (which I hadn't installed at the time because it seemed unnecessary), so I turned off the defrag service and have been using that on my mechanical drives.

But the reason I bumped this thread was to report that I think I finally found out what was causing my SSD to be defragged even though it should have been turned off in Disk Defragmenter.

It turns out that my virus scanner (Norton Internet Security 2010) has an "Idle Time Optimizer" which is on by default and which seems to call the defrag service to periodically optimize the boot drive. Thanks Norton, but no thanks. This would also explain why I was seeing the rogue defrag running at wierd times that did not match up to the times that the regular defrag would run (i.e. the default defrag schedule normally runs at 1AM but I was seeing my SSD being defragged at 8PM and other wierd times).

I didn't figure this out myself, but stumbled across this thread at sevenforums.