Does Windows Defrag SSD’s & What Is SSD Optimization?
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
- Most websites tell you not to defrag your SSD but we are here to tell you why you must let Microsoft defrag and optimize your SSD.
Solid State Drives can benefit from a defrag but users like you and I should not run defrag. Windows looks for rare files that will cause SSD's to have problems.
SSD optimization is a critical task that clears gargage files from your SSD that should have been automatically deleted by the SSD controller but wasn't.
This one deserves more view. Many people still think optimization = defrag.
Thanks for the clear informative explanation! I've seen many videos where people are suggesting to turn off the storage optimization schedule and this was really something I was confused about for so long.
This is what I call: quality content.
You are one of the very few sites that is able to clearly explain the Tri/Defrag questions correctly and concisely. Thank you.
Thanks for the information. Cleared up a lot of confusion I was having.
I do defrag my drives, windows adapted to SSD as well but default defrag from Windows is crap compare to a good slow defrag program when it comes to old HDDs arrange.
A good defrag program would take a long time even for SSD when you manually optimize/defrag them, they move cluster around SSD to make sure free space is use properly and avoid copy of new date over the same chips constantly. And for HDD you can even do a simple copy/past and see how bad speed is because windows doesn't defrag completely even if you press that defrag buttom 10x times over, it just do a simple level of defragmentation, fast but incomplete. For most users is better to let the schedule do his thing and if you seek for a good job just run some proper software every 6 months to take care of things the right way.
Certainly important to do on a spinning disk.
thanks man. I almost disabled the optimization schedule
It's not even that simple. NTFS performance suffers greatly when heavily fragmented EVEN on SSD's, probably due to fragmented MFT and other metafiles. I don't use Windows very often (dualboot config with Linux as my main OS). But I noticed that, over time, booting windows 10 took almost 2 minutes. Before login screen even showed up. It was mounting of system NTFS partition that took so long. And, of course, running SPACE type defragmentation on SSD is not a good idea. The only defragmenter I found with capability to gently "defrag" SSD is O&O Defrag. It minimizes number of used memory cells and then trims those not used, with focus on defragmenting the metafiles (especially $MFT). It should only be done when filesystem performance is noticeably slower than it should be. I have had not the same issue with ext4 filesystem. BTW after "defragging" my SSD, Windows now starts in 15 seconds. Not an ad, just my personal experience.
Yes, I understand your point about defragging space. I think the point of defragmenting your SSD every year or two makes sense and that the conventional wisdom that you should never ever defragment your SSD is simply wrong.
What is best the "optimized" optimization interval? Weekly or monthly? Does it effect longevity like defragging does?
Correct me if I'm wrong but there is a defrag option in the start menu. When I click on it it doesn't even run. So my guess is that it doesn't even let you run it?
its important to run your disk defragment many so called tech computers experts claim it is not needed i did not do it for month on my last computer of 10 years just recently got a new one after Christmas HP the old PC it went to a drag so make sure it set to settings too defrag automatically
Thx bro i've just stepped on another video saying you should disable it but i knew something wasn't right.
Great breakdown.
O & O defrag does marvellous job on super optimizing SSD drives without loosing memory cells life, because the program manages to monitor SSD drive all the way, ive used it and the benefits are Great
Let me tell you why you should some times actually defrag an nand flash based drive.
Not only it actually improves performance IF fragmentation is actually reached to very bad levels but should only be done if you do not wish back up the disk and then reformat it just to sequentially write the data again on it (which is actually better most of the time unless the drive is using its DRAM to do defragmentation or the software is using either that DRAM cache or your PC's RAM which is NOT the most safe thing to do without a UPS + pretty much no software i know does and of this to any extend).
While SSDs chips have very consistent and very low seek time for random read speeds compared to an HDDs but a factor of a thousand, the more fragmentation there is the more these times add up, so after some point, you will notice the difference and TRIM actually does nothing to prevent that and mostly, not even NTFS itself even thought it supposedly has some fail safe to prevent and actually does catch most of it but not in all cases as it seems.
Being the person who has tested this twice, once on a regular SATA SSD and an other time on an NVME drive i know from first hand, i had this Crucial MX300 i got back in 2017 and was my main OS drive for 4 years which is now is at 90% Health and had around 14% fragmentation at the time before i tried to defragment it as it was doing only 17ishMB/S 4k random read speeds, which was not what doing when it was new, so i said f this i will test the theory, and after it finished, the 4K random speeds jumped back to as if it was new, which was around 57MB/s and i was surprised that this happened so it proved what i said above about seek times.
The NVME test, i did just yesterday and yes of course i wasted write cycles on an MLC based 2TB NVME which also has DRAM and SLC cache but let me tell you, seeing, the 4K random read speed go up from 23MB/s (which was atrocious for that drive since it has somehow managed to get 38% fragmentation levels, sounds kinda insane because i could tell the drive was slower than it should) all the way up to 180mb/s as if it was new again is something you can't deny, and even TRIM command on it now works faster on it.
I bet this is an issue with how NTFS handles writing files in certain scenarios since that NVME was almost 2 yo, was never reformated from the first time it was made as NTFS + it's for games.
(and cluster size is the same for all, 4K for obvious reasons)
I TRIM once or twice a week manually but this doesn't always seem to be enough and MS knows it which is why it selectively does some defraging to SSDs as you said and my experiment done twice proves that.
Sequential writes are always faster because they don't cause any drive to pause reading then go any file somewhere else and then either do that again or go back, which is why even though 4K read speed is the performance king of metrics in drives (with IOPS as well) because a lot of reads are random, if files where to have always been red sequentially, we would get crazy ass speeds all the time but because we don't that's why SSDs basically are with us and have mostly solved this issue.
After I defragged my SSD that was at 70% fragmentation using the defrag command line utility my boot time decreased significantly. I wonder why no one publishes speed tests to show how defragging a heavily fragmented SSD effects boot times.
the ssd controller can not know when a file is deleted, because that is an OS level operation, so it can’t trim space by itself
Good to know. Thanks
Actually SSD is optimized after defragmentation is done, speed differences are evident, there are professional programs for it, which does it carefully
I ran a defrag for both my drives, hdd and SSD and the drive is 8 years old. Ever since the laptop has been crashing randomly. I'm worried I exhausted the drive and I'm trying to get enough time to get windows 10 on a boot disk to install on a new hard drive
Windows 11 thinks my USB SSDs are HDDs! I've tried various things to correct this ridiculous situation, but to no avail! ... To avoid automatic defragmentation of my USB SSDs I had to turn off defragmentation / optimisation, and I've installed Smart Defrag, which correctly identifies the drives. Unlike the Windows utility, if you need to, you can manually set the media type on Smart Defrag.
Additionally, does one defragment or trim an SMR (shingled magnetic recording) HDD? I believe it should be trimmed, like an SSD?
I'm still confused... so don't optimize SSD'S???
Just let windows do it's job. It knows better when to do it.
@dizy82 Then Windows should've grayed out that Optimize button,
Thanks for letting me know.
It is a rare case that you should manually start a Defrag on an SSD, but it will NOT damage the SSD if you do start it manually every year or so.
Recap: DON'T defrag SSD
Hey Mel - you SHOULD defag your SSD every few YEARS