Defrag.exe

pseymour said:

Windows does defrag an SSD, sometimes, under certain circumstances.

The real and complete story - Does Windows defragment your SSD?

There has been a LOT of confusion around Windows, SSDs (hard drives), and ...

www.hanselman.com

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Interesting article... my only thought would be whether something has changed in the last ten years with SSD's to change those rules and ruminations. That post was back in the Win8 days. To be clear, I don't know if anything has. I don't follow the SSD world that closely. But I've found, as the article itself discusses in a way, that assumptions are a bad way to decide technical issues.

Either way, I learned a lot in this thread

Levitate11 said:

Interesting article... my only thought would be whether something has changed in the last ten years with SSD's to change those rules and ruminations. That post was back in the Win8 days. To be clear, I don't know if anything has. I don't follow the SSD world that closely. But I've found, as the article itself discusses in a way, that assumptions are a bad way to decide technical issues.

Either way, I learned a lot in this thread

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Newer SSDs have much of those functions built in their firmware. OS can only force them to do it on different schedule. Trim command is just a trigger for all functions to start.

Trim is also logged in event viewer under application.

Levitate11 said:

whether something has changed in the last ten years with SSD's to change those rules and ruminations

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Specifics probably have changed, but the general idea is that Windows does different things based on the drive. It doesn’t just blindly assume it’s a spinner and wastefully re-write it.

It’s a lot like how BitLocker acts differently if the drive supports encryption itself.

TairikuOkami said:

You do not. 11 was defragmenting SSDs every day, then MS fixed it, then fixed it again. Fool me once ... and thrice, no chance.

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Apart from bricking an OCZ SSD back when SSDs were becoming the latest craze on the domestic market I had some out-dated third party software do a defrag on a very expensive 240GB Kingston SSD. The SSD still worked but its read and write speeds were never the same after ward. Kingston did eventually develop some firmware to stop this sort of thing from happening but I was stuck with a compromised drive. I'm amazed to see MS still doing this today. I'm not confusing defrag for TRIM here and to see others calling TRIM "defrag" is somewhat alarming for me.

p

Scannerman said:

Apart from bricking an OCZ SSD back when SSDs were becoming the latest craze on the domestic market I had some out-dated third party software do a defrag on a very expensive 240GB Kingston SSD. The SSD still worked but its read and write speeds were never the same after ward. Kingston did eventually develop some firmware to stop this sort of thing from happening but I was stuck with a compromised drive. I'm amazed to see MS still doing this today. I'm not confusing defrag for TRIM here and to see others calling TRIM "defrag" is somewhat alarming for me.

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Doesn't help that MS has TRIM under "Optimize and Defragement your drive" in the Tools section and running out of the defrag executable.

pseymour said:

Specifics probably have changed, but the general idea is that Windows does different things based on the drive. It doesn’t just blindly assume it’s a spinner and wastefully re-write it.

It’s a lot like how BitLocker acts differently if the drive supports encryption itself.

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I realize that... but my question is really whether the advice in the article still applies to the current generation of SSD's.

As @CountMike notes:

CountMike said:

Newer SSDs have much of those functions built in their firmware. OS can only force them to do it on different schedule. Trim command is just a trigger for all functions to start.

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So is the MS software integrating with the Manufacturers SSD optimization... or are they fighting it out at the wholesale level?

Levitate11 said:

but my question is really whether the advice in the article still applies to the current generation of SSD's.

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Yes, it does.

Levitate11 said:

So is the MS software integrating with the Manufacturers SSD optimization... or are they fighting it out at the wholesale level?

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The scheduled task that runs as part of Windows Automatic Maintenance (WAM) is designed to work in tandem with the SSD's internal optimizations.

That said, for the average user whose internal storage doesn't include any HDDs so it only consists of one or more SSDs, installing Condusiv DymaxIO will almost always be overkill (if not serious overkill). Whereas SSDs being subjected to heavy I/O workloads commonly on something like a heavy-duty (workstation or similar) PC or server very often can benefit from this paid software's advanced optimization technologies, and can actually even do so a lot more substantially than many think, both in terms of performance and life of the SSDs.

DymaxIO gives real-world improvements the magnitude of which tends to greatly depend on the various types of workloads and data use. For example, just because the number of IOPs that your SSDs can provide looks to be wonderous on paper or in a benchmark chart, doesn't mean that they can't easily fall short on IOPs under certain specific conditions. So, one of the things that DymaxIO does is that it prevents Windows from keep hammering the SSDs with two (or three or four or five) boatloads of I/O operations when it's not necessary. So, you'd think that Windows by itself is smart enough that it never will hurt the performance and life of the SDDs, and you'd think wrong. Then again, the good news is that the scheduled task is fully adequate for a lot of users (myself included).