Windows 10/8/7 defrag considerations

Learned some interesting info concerning defragmentation in an IT session today. An excellent article is at http://www.thewindowsc​lub.com/disk-defragmenter-windows but some quick comments that may be of interest follow:

In Windows 7, Microsoft had turned off defragmentation for Solid State Disks, although in my own instance, it seemed to fail to notice the SSD and ran defrag on a regular basis. In Windows 8 the tool has undergone a change into a general disk optimization tool and apparently it is enabled by default for SSDs.

By default, the Windows defrag tool only defragments files smaller than 64 MB, for according to Microsoft’s benchmarks, fragments of this size, which already consist of at least 16000 contiguous clusters, have a negligible impact on performance. As our image/video file sizes get larger, this may become a consideration.

Interesting info John, thanks for sharing.

After reading this I checked my Windows 10 Pro x64 system. Its boot drive is an SSD. Although Win10 correctly identified the SSD, it still turned ON weekly "optimization." I turned it OFF.

Optimization is not the same as defragmentation.

"Don’t Waste Time Optimizing Your SSD, Windows Knows What Its Doing"
https://www.howtogeek.​com …ows-knows-what-its-doing/

Edit: corrected the url. Thanks John from PA.

JWdlft wrote in post #18332304
Optimization is not the same as defragmentation.

"Don’t Waste Time Optimizing Your SSD, Windows Knows What Its Doing"
https://www.howtogeek.​com …nows-what-its-doing/[/URL

Actually Optimize Drives, as in Windows 10, is in the words of Microsoft what was previously called Disk Defragmenter.

Your link by the way takes you to a definition of "URL." The correct link is https://www.howtogeek.​com …ows-knows-what-its-doing/.

John from PA wrote in post #18332421
Actually Optimize Drives, as in Windows 10, is in the words of Microsoft what was previously called Disk Defragmenter.

It may be in the case of standard drives but it isn't in the case of SSDs. Defrag rearranges files parts on the drive so they are contiguous and requires several read writes to do it. This is unnecessary on an SSD as they aren't read in the same way as Disk Drive.

When acting on an SSD the Optimize Drives function does not defrag it. instead uses the Retrim command, which is a forced version of the Trim command used to remove deleted files (rather than move files around).

John from PA wrote in post #18332421
Actually Optimize Drives, as in Windows 10, is in the words of Microsoft what was previously called Disk Defragmenter.

Your link by the way takes you to a definition of "URL." The correct link is https://www.howtogeek.​com …ows-knows-what-its-doing/.

Apologies, I thought I deleted '[/'url]' from the embedded link, thanks for correcting it.

As Dan Marchant above says, and the article I tried to link to states, optimization of SSDs in Windows is not defragmentation. I can read too.

Thanks to several of you for pointing out the difference between defragmentation and trimming on SSD Drives. I just re-enabled optimization for my SSD.