Windows DOES defrag your SSD (article).. i don't get it

[omega3]

Found an in-depth article here which claims that Windows does defrag an SSD where I thought W7 and beyond did not do this..

Just to make sure.. if you've just installed Windows 7 on a new system with SSD.. what settings do you have to check.. anybody can put a bullet checklist here.. thanks!

And yeah.. your thoughts on the article cause i don't get it 😕

 

[mikeymikec]

Well, one thing about the article:

In the old days, you would sometimes be told by power users to run this at the command line to see if TRIM was enabled for your SSD. A zero result indicates it is.
fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

As I understand it, is wrong (based partly on the assumption that "enabled" means "currently working"). That option is there to provide an override to stop TRIM working, not to enable it in the first place, furthermore the option is set the same by default (ie. not to disable TRIM) on a system that has only HDDs in (the 'furthermore' point is fact btw).

The guy says he is a Microsoft employee. Is he a Windows developer? Does he work with the guys who manage storage-related code? He doesn't quote his sources (ideally, direct from microsoft.com). Without such information he's just some random blogger as far as I'm concerned.

With regard to your request for a checklist, if I'm upgrading an older system to include an SSD then I check whether the SuperFetch service has been set to manual, and I check whether a defrag has occurred on the SSD through the defrag UI. If it's a brand-new system configured to use AHCI I don't bother doing much in the way of checks; if an ATTO benchmark comes up with figures that tally with my expectations from running on other SSD systems, then I consider it good to go.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

I guess there are performance benefits to "defragging", maybe it's just doing trim.

Anyway, my ssd is about a year old, default win8 setting, looks like it's on. If I look at the techreport ssd endurance article I'm at about 1% of the ssd's flash memory lifetime. So nothing to worry about.

 

[omega3]

If you have both an SSD and HDD in one system, do you then have to make certain settings so windows will defrag the HDD but not the SDD?

 

[Flapdrol1337]

I wouldn't bother.

 

[Fernando 1]

Just to make sure.. if you've just installed Windows 7 on a new system with SSD.. what settings do you have to check.. anybody can put a bullet checklist here.. thanks!

The only thing you should check is, whether your SSD is shown by the Win7 Defrag Tool as "Solid State Disk" or as "Hard Disk Drive".
If the SSD has been detected correctly by the OS, there is nothing to worry about. The OS will not automaticly defrag the SSD.
If the SSD is shown by the Win7 Defrag Tool as "Hard Disk Drive", I recommend to run the "Windows Experience Index" (MEI) application and then to re-open the GUI of the Defrag Tool. Usually the SSD will be correctly shown as "Solid State Drive" after having run the MEI tool. If not, I recommend to disable the automaticly done scheduled defrag service.

 

[Puffnstuff]

If you check the windows 8.1 defrag utility it will confirm that windows does indeed defrag your ssd. With that said it doesn't indicate the level of maintenance that it performs and I leave it alone and let it do its thing. In the past 3rd party utilities such as perfectdisk would enable ssd defrag by default and you would have to manually disable it.

 

[bbhaag]

If you have both an SSD and HDD in one system, do you then have to make certain settings so windows will defrag the HDD but not the SDD?

I'm not sure about 7 but 8.1 knows and chooses the correct settings automatically.

 

[Fernando 1]

I'm not sure about 7 but 8.1 knows and chooses the correct settings automatically.

Even Win8.1 doesn't always detect an SSD correctly. I have realized this issue several times with my SSD RAID0 array.
The problem is,that Win8/8.1 doesn't execute MEI automaticly at the end of the OS installation.

 

[mikeymikec]

If you have both an SSD and HDD in one system, do you then have to make certain settings so windows will defrag the HDD but not the SDD?

Not in my experience. I have that setup here on Win7, I didn't have to tell it anything specific in order for it to auto defrag the HDD and leave the SSD alone.

The only thing you should check is, whether your SSD is shown by the Win7 Defrag Tool as "Solid State Disk" and as "Hard Disk Drive".

Windows 7 does not tell you what type of drive the volume is.

 

[IronWing]

Windows 7 will also report that defrag was run when only the analysis was run (looks just like mikeymikec's screenshot above).

 

[coercitiv]

If you check the windows 8.1 defrag utility it will confirm that windows does indeed defrag your ssd. With that said it doesn't indicate the level of maintenance that it performs and I leave it alone and let it do its thing.

It doesn't defrag, it trims. It even says so after you hit the Optimize button.

 

[WilliamM2]

I don't have any of my drives defrag automatically. There's no point, I'll defrag mechanicals once a month or so with Auslogics. All drives show "Never run" in the Win7 drive utility.

 

[bradly1101]

I read the SSD guide in here and it said that if you have Windows 7 installed you don't have to do anything since it will turn off defrag for SSD's. I just never worried about it, but I just checked the defrag utility and it had automatically defragged my new NVMe SSD (installed as a storage drive). So I turned that off.

 

[larryccf]

......

Just to make sure.. if you've just installed Windows 7 on a new system with SSD.. what settings do you have to check.. anybody can put a bullet checklist here.. thanks!

...... 😕

TheSSDReview.com has a "SSD Optimization" checklist of things to check they're dis-abled or to dis-able, basically to optimize performance. It bumped my benchmarks a slight bit, but worth taking a look at - go over to their site and you'll see it - for some reason, i can't pull their web up in a "readable" form on this browser

 

[aviator79]

Found an in-depth article here which claims that Windows does defrag an SSD where I thought W7 and beyond did not do this.....
your thoughts on the article cause i don't get it

Yeah you don't get it. Conclusion:

No, Windows is not foolishly or blindly running a defrag on your SSD every night, and no, Windows defrag isn't shortening the life of your SSD unnecessarily. Modern SSDs don't work the same way that we are used to with traditional hard drives.

Yes, your SSD's file system sometimes needs a kind of defragmentation and that's handled by Windows, monthly by default, when appropriate. The intent is to maximize performance and a long life. If you disable defragmentation completely, you are taking a risk that your filesystem metadata could reach maximum fragmentation and get you potentially in trouble.

You just have to read the WHOLE article and check the context.
Noothing wrong here, everything as it should be.

 

[ArisVer]

I have an SD card that I use as a storage space for torrents as they are accessed all the time and it was set to auto defraq under Windows 8.1.

 

[bbhaag]

Even Win8.1 doesn't always detect an SSD correctly. I have realized this issue several times with my SSD RAID0 array.
The problem is,that Win8/8.1 doesn't execute MEI automaticly at the end of the OS installation.

OK I guess for the .5% of consumers that decide to run a raid array on their 8.1 pc it might not pick it up and display it correctly.......for the rest of it does just fine.

 

[BFG10K]

The guy says he is a Microsoft employee. Is he a Windows developer? Does he work with the guys who manage storage-related code? He doesn't quote his sources (ideally, direct from microsoft.com). Without such information he's just some random blogger as far as I'm concerned.

He's the real deal. He works "in Open Source on ASP.NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft", according to his bio. I've also seen blog posts from him on Microsoft sites.

Also, those quotes about defragmentation are coming from developers on the Windows storage team.

 

[Makaveli]

Windows 7 in my system has always detected my drive as an SSD and knows not to defrag it. I've never had to do anything in that area and been on a SSD since 2009.

Two 160GB G2 SSD's in Raid 0 Windows detected fine.

 

[SSBrain]

Windows 7 will never defrag SSDs. However, Windows 8/8.1/10 will in some cases. This happens during the first maintenance window after installing the operating system for the first time, and very roughly, about once a month, regardless of the optimization interval set in the defragment/optimize window. You can check this out in the system event log.

It's true that clicking "optimize" there won't defragment the SSD and TRIM pass on the free space will be performed.

File system fragmentation can indeed degrade read performance in on SSD pratice, though. During read operations, the operating system has to send a new I/O command for every non-contiguous/non-sequential sector range for any given file. The more fragmented a file gets, the more the overall read task will become random-like, and as you should know, random performance is usually lower than sequential performance, even on SSDs.

Luckily, unlike hard disks, SSDs don't suffer from seek latency and the file system-level performance penalty of fragmentation on SSDs is usually low enough that even a relatively high fragmentation won't be very noticeable in most cases. Most people didn't notice there was a performance problem with their Samsung 840/840 EVO SSDs, after all.

I've tested the effect of file system fragmentation on SSD performance in the past:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37091621&postcount=34