Windows 10 Defragger bug defrags SSD Drives too often

erek

erek

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Windows 10 defragmenter, or the "Optimize Drives feature", does not defragment SSDs. If it detects that it's an SSD, all it will do is run the trim command on the drive. I don't think there is really much downside to running the trim command too often.

I thought bleepingcomputer.com was a reasonably knowledgeable site, but that's crazy that they apparently think that it's actually trying to defrag the SSDs. It's not.
 
It is a bug I’ve seen myself. That being said, who cares? It’s just running a trim. I wish it ran a trim every boot up to be honest.
 
Looks fine to me. Should probably manually trim F: and G: while I have this open.

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GotNoRice said:
I thought bleepingcomputer.com was a reasonably knowledgeable site, but that's crazy that they apparently think that it's actually trying to defrag the SSDs. It's not.
Click to expand...

I think we still are :)

Seriously, though, we thought the same thing until we did the tests ourselves. When launched from the automatic maintenance screen, we saw it defrag our C:\ SSD drive, perform around 8 phases of consolidation (which I believe is part of the defrag process in Windows), and then perform a trim.

Posted a video last night of Windows 10 performing the defrag to our article.

While the common thought was that Windows does not defrag SSDs, based on the video it appears to do it during the automatic maintenance. Possibly, due to that maintenance on SSD drives with shadow volume copies enabled as referenced in the article?

Definitely a strange one.
 
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GotNoRice said:
Windows 10 defragmenter, or the "Optimize Drives feature", does not defragment SSDs. If it detects that it's an SSD, all it will do is run the trim command on the drive. I don't think there is really much downside to running the trim command too often.

I thought bleepingcomputer.com was a reasonably knowledgeable site, but that's crazy that they apparently think that it's actually trying to defrag the SSDs. It's not.
Click to expand...

The article literally has a video of it defragging the SSD, not running TRIM - the bug is that it was defragging when the automatic schedule tripped instead of TRIM like expected.
 
Windows 10 is a bitch to SSDs, it is not normal that a system SSD should have 10TBW after just 6 months.
 
M76 said:
Windows 10 is a bitch to SSDs, it is not normal that a system SSD should have 10TBW after just 6 months.
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Mine has 19.5 TBW after 2.5 years, and that includes deleting and installing games.
 
socK said:
The article literally has a video of it defragging the SSD, not running TRIM - the bug is that it was defragging when the automatic schedule tripped instead of TRIM like expected.
Click to expand...

Windows 10 performs a limited defrag on SSDs (in addition to trim) as necessary for optimization of the volume shadow copy service (used by System Restore). It's not performing a defrag in the traditional sense (it's not defragging your SSD the same way it defrags a spinning disk). It is supposed to happen once per month. If the bug in 2004 is causing it to perform that limited defrag more often than it should, that is not a good thing, but not really a big deal either. This is because:

-Only fragmented files are defragmented. It doesn't keep defragmenting the same files over and over again. This would obviously limit any damage as a result of the limited defrag occurring too often.
-By default, windows does not defragment files larger than 64MB. The focus on smaller files, combined with the above, means it's unlikely to cause a significant amount of wear to your drive.

But it's a bug nonetheless. Good job to those who helped identify it and put pressure on Microsoft to fix it.
 
Didn't you guys get the memo? m$ knows whats best for you computer. But yeah, thought all we had to do for SSD was trim them once in awhile. Also I heard there was a bug, you couldn't disable auto defrag from tools menu. Wonder if you could just delete the task or has that been deprecated as well.
 
GotNoRice said:
If the bug in 2004 is causing it to perform that limited defrag more often than it should, that is not a good thing, but not really a big deal either.
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As we stated, it is happening more often if a user reboots in between the default weekly schedule. If they do not reboot, it "should" retain the optimization history and skip it.

So at default settings, maximum 4 times a month it would be performed.

If someone changes it to daily maintenance, then every day.

GotNoRice said:
-Only fragmented files are defragmented. It doesn't keep defragmenting the same files over and over again. This would obviously limit any damage as a result of the limited defrag occurring too often.
-By default, windows does not defragment files larger than 64MB. The focus on smaller files, combined with the above, means it's unlikely to cause a significant amount of wear to your drive.
Click to expand...

When you say "It doesn't keep defragmenting the same files over and over again", what exactly do you mean?

When we performed this test, it first performed the defragmented phase, then it went through 6 phases of consolidation, then it ran a Trim.

The defrag and 6 phases took a little over 8 minutes to complete. Then it trimmed.

This is normal for an SSD?
 
Armenius said:
Mother of the nine Muses. The name is lent from the prefix "mneme-" which means memory, hence Mnemosyne is my storage drive ;).
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Nice, never thought of looking it up as if it was an actual word. It's being used by Marko Klooks in his Ballistic series. :)
 
Grinler said:
The defrag and 6 phases took a little over 8 minutes to complete. Then it trimmed.

This is normal for an SSD?
Click to expand...

No, I would say that it's not typical. I cannot replicate that on any of my systems. Here is an example of what I'm seeing:

For reference, my C drive is an NVME SSD with Windows, programs, and a handful of my most important games. My D Drive is a pair of 7200RPM drives in Raid:0 for storage of unimportant files, and my E Drive is a large SATA SSD which I use for the rest of my game library as well as some VMs.



Fresh reboot. Time of last optimization has not been retained, which does indicate/confirm that a bug is present. Automatic maintenance is then started. After analyzing the drive, it takes almost exactly 30 seconds to perform the limited defrag on my primary SSD. It takes about a minute total to finish the entire maintenance, which includes both of my SSDs as well as my mechanical hard drives (two 7200rpm HDDs in Raid:0).

Also note that while it does take 30 seconds to perform the limited defrag on my primary drive, it essentially skips the defrag and goes right to the Trim process on my second SSD. Why? Because the limited defrag only deals with files that impact the Volume Shadow Copy service (System Restore, etc). Nothing on my 2nd SSD (My E Drive) has anything to do with the Volume Shadow Copy service.
 
PeaKr said:
Didn't you guys get the memo? m$ knows whats best for you computer. But yeah, thought all we had to do for SSD was trim them once in awhile. Also I heard there was a bug, you couldn't disable auto defrag from tools menu. Wonder if you could just delete the task or has that been deprecated as well.
Click to expand...
You into Linux for the freedom and control and ability to optimize how you see fit?
 
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