Windows 10 update could be damaging your SSD

erek

erek

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"As a result of the Windows 10 2004 bug, the Optimize Drives tool is defragging drives every time the connected device is rebooted. In effect, this means many SSDs are being defragged circa 30x more frequently than is optimal.


Microsoft has acknowledged the issue, first identified in June, and has already rolled out a fix for members of its Insider program with Windows 10 Build 19042.487 (20H2)."

https://www.techradar.com/news/windows-10-update-could-be-damaging-your-ssd
 
TheSlySyl said:
Why is it defragging SSDs at all?

Also, this may explain my seemingly random SSD temperature spikes...
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Because SSDs are still faster sequentially than in random access; and highly fragmented drives reduce random IO to fragmented levels.
 
Hakaba said:
If there even is one.... what would we get? .35c? Wouldn’t even be worth the postage or the gas needed to hit the bank.
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In fairness, the last few class actions I've been a part of required filling out forms on a web page and they paid out through Paypal. Also, I received $350 from a Google Pixel class action and some ~$40 from the Sirius/XM one. So it could be worth your while.
 
I feel like this is not accurate. While I have seen the reported bug of showing the drive as "needs optimization" all the time... it doesn't defrag when you run it, it TRIMs. That won't hurt your SSD unless your SSD was made by morons. You can send TRIM commands all day and it will do nothing other than give the drive information it already had. I've tested it and verified that all it is doing on my systems is sending a TRIM, no defrag.

Is there any proof it is actually running defragmentation, or is this just tech journalists not knowing how shit works?
 
TheSlySyl said:
Also, this may explain my seemingly random SSD temperature spikes...
Click to expand...


Working from a laptop (because of the work from home) I have seen a few pretty random temperature spikes on my internal nvme drives recently when I was not using the drive.
 
I've been trained now. :cry: After any large patch/update, I check-

Remote Connections off
Defrag Drives off
System Protection off

On LTSC, it seems to stick. On Pro, well???? I check them.
 
Not a big deal unless you have a really old or really small drive.

Modern SSD's have much better write endurance than most people think.

I link - again - the Tech Reports SSD endurance test. It is old, from before 3D NAND, modern huge drive sizes (which increases write endurance) and controller optimizations frther reducing write amplification, so things today are even better than they were then.

Short version: Don't worry about SSD write endurance. You'll replace the drive long before it wears out, even if windows throws in a few accidental defrags.

SSD write endurance is just not something users need to worry about anymore (unless you do something really dumb, like use a small TLC drive as a cache device, or something like that)
 
I restart daily and checked the event logs, it's defragging once a week for me
 
Hakaba said:
If there even is one.... what would we get? .35c? Wouldn’t even be worth the postage or the gas needed to hit the bank.
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You laugh but my mom went out of her way to cash a 40c check for some refund when I was a kid. Even in the 90s it was ridiculous lol.
 
PhaseNoise said:
TRIM doesn't do very much at the block level. This is nonsense.
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Not just very much, it does NOTHING. What TRIM does is send a message to the SSD controller that says "These blocks are free of data, you may reclaim them." Windows and MacOS send a trim for any file as soon as you delete it (Linux is a little lazier on TRIMs). The optimize function in Windows just makes sure the drive is up to date on that information. It sends a TRIM for all blocks that the MFT shows as free. However it does nothing with the data allocation or anything. It just says "Hey drive, here's all the blocks that are free." It is then 100% on the drive controller. The controller has the map of allocated blocks to actual memory pages. It will then go and have a look and if it finds something that has data and it gets a TRIM for, it'll mark it for garbage collect/reclamation. It will do that based on whatever its programming tells it to. If it gets a TRIM for a block it has already cleaned out, it does nothing.
 
kirbyrj said:
In fairness, the last few class actions I've been a part of required filling out forms on a web page and they paid out through Paypal. Also, I received $350 from a Google Pixel class action and some ~$40 from the Sirius/XM one. So it could be worth your while.
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I got over $80 from the Sirius lawsuit, the predicted payout was $5 but I guess more people opted for the free months of service than they thought would.

I don't think this is worthy of a lawsuit but it might be if you lump all the problems their forced updates have been causing together.
 
Sycraft said:
What TRIM does is send a message to the SSD controller that says "These blocks are free of data, you may reclaim them." Windows and MacOS send a trim for any file as soon as you delete it (Linux is a little lazier on TRIMs).
Click to expand...

That really depends.

When TRIM was first announced you could (and still can) manually add it to your /etc/fstab entry with an "discard" setting. This would make Linux (or at least ext4 file systems) behave like in Windows, and issue the trim commands as soon as the blocks are freed.

This is no longer considered best practice, as it can - in some circumstances - rob you of performance, but you can still add it to your fstab if you want.

Each distribution handles it a little differently these days out of the box, but in general the configuration is such that it issues the fstrim command on the drive when the system is idle, to avoid having a user performance impact.
 
pendragon1 said:
why you quoting me for those? also, the second one is from Jan, nothing to do with this.
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The link from January is just showing that the forever in perpetual beta windows 10 was having problems back then.
  • Thank you for reporting that the Optimize Drives Control Panel was incorrectly showing that optimization hadn’t run on some devices. We’ve fixed it in this build.

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-i...dows-10-insider-preview-build-19042-487-20h2/
We fixed an issue that causes the Optimize Drives dialog to incorrectly report that previously optimized drives need to be optimized again

Should this be a concern?

Defragging SSD drives too often​
The general rule has always been that you should avoid defragging solid-state drives (SSDs) to prevent unnecessary wear and tear.​
​
Microsoft developers, though, have stated in the past that there is some benefit to defragging a solid-state drive (SSD) that has become heavily fragmented, and due to this will defrag an SSD drive once a month.​
​
"Actually Scott and Vadim are both wrong. Storage Optimizer will defrag an SSD once a month if volume snapshots are enabled. This is by design and necessary due to slow volsnap copy on write performance on fragmented SSD volumes."​
 
If repeated TRIM (windows 'defrag') calls cause problems for the drive - that drive is crap, as previous posters implied/indicated.
This is not a destructive command, it's just informing the drive what the real active sections are from the filesystem/OS (it cannot otherwise know this).

I actually like this bug. Let's expose some garbage drives, name names.
 
well whatever it is/was its gone in the last few insider builds, at least its not affecting me. c: is at 6 days, the rest are at 13 days since optimizing. which is about right.
 
criccio said:
Would this be the reason my crappy HP SSD died a few months back?

https://hardforum.com/threads/the-i...in-event-viewer-and-poor-performance.1997277/
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Probably not. Crappy SSD = crappy SSD.

That being said, I have seen way more nvme SSDs die than SATA SSDs. My pretty well thought out theory is because the way the nvme drives and sockets are designed, the socket puts some upwards pressure on the drive which is fastened down on the other end. This cause the circuit board to flex over time and can cause the solder joints to crack, especially after many heating/cooling cycles. crappy design is a crappy design.
 
TheSlySyl said:
Why is it defragging SSDs at all?

Also, this may explain my seemingly random SSD temperature spikes...
Click to expand...
It's not. Since Windows 8.1, Disk Defragmenter was replaced with Disk Optimizer. The difference is the later detects and supports SSD's which means it does not defrag them. Rather it issues a TRIM command once every 30 days to signal to the SSD to wipe uneeded blocks. This makes the write process faster because the SSD does not have to wipe a block prior to writing to it. Disk Optimizer retains the defrag functionality for HDDs.
 
Here is how you handle MS pushing untested feature updates.
1598704936285.png
 
CEO_OF_CBT said:
How do you prevent windows from automatically doing it?
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Click start then type "defrag" into search. Brings up the "defrag and optimize drives" app. Click on that. Will open the "optimize drives" window. At the bottom is a button to turn on/turn off drive optimization.
 
I checked, my drives had never been optimized. I just did it now, to be sure, only took a few seconds.
 
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