Optimise for SSD's. Has anything recently changed?

Before 22H2 I seem to remember that 'Optimise' finally got fixed and did indeed work as expected (weekly).

I'm noticing that it hasn't run on my C and D partitions (which are one internal drive) but it has run for F and M which is a second internal drive. For the moment I'm just going to leave it and see what happens, but I wondered if anyone else has encountered this?

22H2 was a clean install on its release a few weeks ago. Fully up to date and no issues reported with SFC check.

Just checked on my laptop and all seems to be ok.

weekly seems to work OK for my machine. Just checked and they were Trimmed about 24 hours ago. Just keep an eye on it and give it some help if needed.

My 2 SSDs optimization is set to weekly but I've checked and it hadn't been run in 30 days (and was marked as needed lol). I've had this issue for ages and it's still there

I turn off the schedule trim and make it part of my monthly backup process, but a drive will not need trim run as often if it is not being actively used for file deletion/ writing.
Drives that support trim will also run it on their own in the background according to how it is set in the firmware.

Thanks for checking and looking folks.

fruh said:

My 2 SSDs optimization is set to weekly but I've checked and it hadn't been run in 30 days (and was marked as needed lol). I've had this issue for ages and it's still there

Click to expand...

That is something I used to find in the past although it seemed to get fixed a few months back... until now.

DigitalGoat said:

I turn off the schedule trim and make it part of my monthly backup process, but a drive will not need trim run as often if it is not being actively used for file deletion/ writing.
Drives that support trim will also run it on their own in the background according to how it is set in the firmware.

Click to expand...

I'll mention something I used to notice here. Incremental backup sizes always seemed to reflect when Windows had run a trim/optimise routine on its own schedule. The next incremental file size was always considerably larger than the average of the ones before and after. Kind of expected really.

When I ran an optimise routine manually the large increase in backup size never seemed to happen, it was as if Windows was showing it had run on demand but nothing behind the scenes actually happened.

I'll keep watching.

Still no sign of Optimise running on my C and D partitions on main drive but it has just run on the second internal SSD. I'll still leave it and see what happens.

If you run trim using PowerShell with the verbose switch you would see that even though the command is run the drive may not take any action as the drive can ignore the command under certain conditions set by the firmware.
The Windows trim command I beleive is actually a re trim command as trim is normally part of the erase/ write function, although it may be delayed if the drive is busy.
I am pretty sure that SSD trim in Windows is set to 30 days regardless of the schedule reported by the app which was altered from use with spinners to include SSDs and seems to report mixed or confusing messages.

As I said in my preferred method above, if a drive is not seeing heavy delete/ write cycles then it will not need trim run as often, a game drive for example that is mostly read from once all your games are installed may not need trimming for several months unlike a boot drive that sees regular updates to the OS files, log files, anti virus definitions etc.
At least this is my understanding of how trim works.

Windows 11 Pro, X64 non-insider build 22621.819

Mine is working...



And I haven't touched or modified anything. In fact, this is the first time seeing it since cleaning installing 22H2 upon release.

DigitalGoat said:

If you run trim using PowerShell with the verbose switch you would see that even though the command is run the drive may not take any action as the drive can ignore the command under certain conditions set by the firmware.
The Windows trim command I beleive is actually a re trim command as trim is normally part of the erase/ write function, although it may be delayed if the drive is busy.

Click to expand...

Interesting you say that.

In the past I noticed that when I ran the Optimise routine manually that my backups (incrementals) showed no significant change in file size from before and after, which sort of implied nothing much had happened on the disk although the GUI for Optimise reported it had been carried out.

When the Optimise routine ran on schedule and so was done automatically, I always found the next incremental was significantly bigger suggesting that something had occurred on the drive.

DigitalGoat said:

I am pretty sure that SSD trim in Windows is set to 30 days regardless of the schedule reported by the app

Click to expand...

I'll wait longer at this point and see what happens. I know it used to be like this in W11 (for me at least) but the last few months saw it get fixed and run correctly every week on schedule. A clean install of 22H2 and its back to how it was.

Mooly said:

when I ran the Optimise routine manually that my backups (incrementals) showed no significant change in file size from before and after, which sort of implied nothing much had happened on the disk although the GUI for Optimise reported it had been carried out.

Click to expand...

Optimise does not change file sizes. It merely shuffles bits of files around the place.

Denis

Try3 said:

Optimise does not change file sizes. It merely shuffles bits of files around the place.

Click to expand...

That's right the actual files themselves don't change in size but a disk image file sequence will do because many of the file positions have changed with any shuffling and those changes reflect in the disk image backup file size for both incremental (and differential) backups.

Typically, I would see for example 45Gb initial backup and then a 1Gb, 0.8Gb 1.5Gb, 1.3Gb and then the Optimise runs and the next might be 6Gb and then back to smaller values again.

It was a kind of 'proof' something had happened when the routine had run. Running manually on demand and I never saw that large jump in image file size.

DigitalGoat said:

I am pretty sure that SSD trim in Windows is set to 30 days regardless of the schedule reported by the app which was altered from use with spinners to include SSDs and seems to report mixed or confusing messages.

Click to expand...

Not really. I've not changed my scheduling and as you can see in my image in post #9, the drives are analyzed "Weekly". This was (is) the default setting after a clean install of the 22H2 release. Note under scheduled optimization it says....

Drives are being analyzed on a schedule cadence and optimized as needed
Frequency: Weekly

Click to expand...

What I take that to mean is though the drive is checked "weekly" it'll only be optimized as needed, and that's when the date will change.

This gets even more bizarre. The second internal drive has just been optimised again, that's twice in less than 36 hours. See image in post #7

There is a rather lengthy discussion on the topic here:


Below is just a cut / paste from my post #13 in that thread. Following that cut / paste I have a few additional comments for clarification:

For an SSD, a quick review of what a trim operation actually does:

When data is deleted from a drive, you are not actually removing that data, you are simply deleting the pointers to the areas on the disk where that data is held. For a traditional HD, that's just fine. When you later write to those freed up areas of the disk, there is no performance penalty. You simply write to those areas of the disk the same as always (except in the case of SMR disks, but that's a whole other ball of wax). However, on an SSD, blocks must be erased before they can be written to again. A trim operation will erase areas of the SSD that were previously in use but have now been freed up, doing so in the background so that when the time comes to use those blocks again an erasure does not need to be performed first. A "RETRIM" operation to your SSD is the OS (Windows 11) informing the SSD of all the areas of the disk that should be considered empty. These hints to the SSD will trigger a TRIM operation for areas that the SSD was not already aware that should have been TRIMed.

I want to stress the importance of having a properly trimmed SSD, because the performance problems can be amplified far more than you might initially think. Note that even if you are going to write only 1 byte of data to a block that has not been trimmed, the ENTIRE block must be erased first and the entire block needs to be rewritten. If there are a lot of untrimmed blocks, this can make an ENORMOUS difference in performance.

If you have a lot of free space on your SSDs and you don't write large amounts of data, then less frequent optimization may be just fine. The drive will try to write to trimmed blocks first, however, there are limits to this as other considerations such as wear leveling algorithms come into play as well.

Also, bear in mind that there is absolutely no negative to performing a trim / retrim more frequently. Only blocks that need to be trimmed will be trimmed, doing so more frequently simply means that you will tend to accumulate fewer untrimmed blocks between runs keeping your drive at peak efficiency. Those blocks are going to have to be trimmed at some point in the future anyway. Note too that a retrim only informs a drive of areas that it should consider to be unused. Usually, when everything is running normally, a trim operation is performed as soon as blocks are freed, but if something interferes with this (unexpected shutdown for example), that's when a retrim helps. Because that does not happen often, a retrim usually results in little disk activity anyway, so again, more frequently retrimming has no negative impacts.

---------------
Additional comments:

Normally, a TRIM is triggered as soon as data is deleted from an SSD. This tells the SSD to erase those blocks (when free time is available) so that they are free for immediate writing. If a TRIM were not performed on these, an erase would need to be performed first, severely impacting performance.

However, let's say that you delete 100GB of data from your SSD and immediately afterward an unexpected shutdown of the system takes place. Now those erase operations don't get performed. This is where the scheduled optimization on an SSD comes into play. The optimization sends "hints" (a Re-TRIM) to the SSD saying "these are all the blocks, that I as the operating system know to be unused". The SSD can then check to see if there are any blocks that it had not already erased. If any blocks were missed, it will then perform an erase operation on those blocks.

Note that it is the responsibility of the OS to inform the SSD what blocks are considered unused. The SSD cannot be intelligent enough to understand the inner workings of every possible OS and filesystem, only the OS knows in full gory detail everything that should be considered unused (that is up until a block is actually erased and marked as unused by the SSD).

I hope that this helps to clarify things.

Thanks for info.

Still more weirdness since I posted yesterday. The 2nd drive got trimmed again just a couple of hours after I posted. That surely cannot right. Very very little has changed on that drive, maybe nothing between those trims.

Also, I deleted some 17Gb of files on my C drive about 5 days ago and replaced them with new files shortly afterwards. That did not trigger an analyse/optimise/trim operation.

My solution ; service Op. Drives on manual , once a month trim your SSDs manual .
This is the most safe way for your precious hardware..............

Mooly said:

Thanks for info.

Still more weirdness since I posted yesterday. The 2nd drive got trimmed again just a couple of hours after I posted. That surely cannot right. Very very little has changed on that drive, maybe nothing between those trims.

Also, I deleted some 17Gb of files on my C drive about 5 days ago and replaced them with new files shortly afterwards. That did not trigger an analyse/optimise/trim operation.

Click to expand...

A TRIM operation happens anytime any data is erased. In other words, it happens on the fly. The scheduled optimization is only there to catch anything that has should have been TRIMed but that got missed due to unexpected shutdown, or due to other circumstances.

So, in the instance of the 17GB that you deleted, that would have been TRIMed right away (or in the background when the SSD was not busy).

The scheduled optimization is just that - scheduled. It does not have any bearing upon how much was changed.

Thanks for the explanations.

I'll sit it out for now and see when and if it does run automatically at some point. I suspect it might run at '33 days' simply because that is what used to happen months ago (and that was actually on a different PC).

The interface does say drives are at least analysed weekly and that is not being shown as happening.

And it's just run yet again on that second drive: