Solid State Drives? Optimize? Defragment?

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My nearly new Dell desktop came with a solid state drive and an old time spinning hard drive. Windows 10 Pro offers me opportunities not to ‘defragment’ my drives but rather to ‘optimize’ my drives. Is it safe to ‘optimize’ a solid state drive? Should I let Windows 10 Pro ‘optimize’ both my drives? Should I, instead, use EaseUS Partition Master to 4k align my solid state drive and then optimize my system? (What on earth is 4k optimize?)

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jburk07, Mr. Austin

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You should not do anything to the SSD, let Windows manage it for you.

SSDs do not need to be defragmented because there is no time cost to having non-sequential files and the internal algorithm the drive uses for write optimization is likely to fragment the files anyway.
The only defragmentation Windows does is to keep file fragments to less than X (I can’t remember the number) because Windows can’t track more than X fragments.

When Windows 10 is installed on an SSD it automatically aligns the drive so there is nothing to do afterwards. If you restored the entire disk from backup you may not have aligned the disk, but backup software should have taken that into account.

cheers, Paul

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Loonier, jburk07, Mr. Austin

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Windows OS sets automatically TRIM = On when installed on a SSD drive.

TRIM is a command with the help of which the operating system can tell the solid state drive (SSD) which data blocks are no longer needed and can be deleted, or are marked as free for rewriting. In other words, TRIM is a command that helps the operating system know precisely where the data that you want to move or delete is stored. That way, the solid state drive can access only the blocks holding the data. Furthermore, whenever a delete command is issued by the user or the operating system, the TRIM command immediately wipes the pages or blocks where the files are stored. This means that the next time the operating system tries to write new data in that area, it does not have to wait first to delete it.

https://www.digitalcitizen.life/simple-questions-what-trim-ssds-why-it-useful

TRIM replaces the need for block (4k) alignment, defrag…

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Jesse Farr, Loonier

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This still leaves the ‘optimize” part of the question unanswered. Perhaps a description of what the “optimizing” does might help answer it. Going with my own experience, this might mean ‘deleting no longer useful or undesirable files’, such as temporary Internet files, cookies, etc.

How complete is the deletion of data in an SSD? Does it leave no traces behind that later someone may be able, with appropriate equipment and software, to reconstruct what was there, or at least enough of it to get some idea of what it was?

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
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macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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No traces are left once TRIM has run.

Data recovery via specialized equipment was only a theoretical possibility in very, very old hard disks. Reference here.

cheers, Paul

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Paul T wrote:

Data recovery via specialized equipment was only a theoretical possibility in very, very old hard disks. Reference here.

My experience suggests otherwise; NT4 SP4 with mid 90’s IDE/ATA HDD from local government department with department -specific software installed was pulled/fdisk’ed ‘clean’ before releasing from service and sold ~2000 to a department official who then installed W95 and a small amount of 3rd-party software plus MS Office/Works. ~2002, it was gifted to me. I recognised the source of the PC immediately so I ran a quick test.

I booted it to MBRWork and reset the MBR, pulled the boot floppy and restarted the PC, which then booted into NT. A quick check suggested 0 errors except being unable to log onto the original network so I did a quick run through the installed software, opening templates, etc. Again, no errors. There was ~75% free space on the NT install cf. ~45% on the W95 install, so there was likely to have been significant data overlap/overwriting but no sign of any damaged data when recovered back to the original NT.

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[Paul T]

Unerased data areas isn’t the same thing, but your point is valid – always wipe a mechanical any drive if you want to keep your data private.

cheers, Paul

• This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by Paul T.

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I think that Digital Citizen article is wrong in a number of ways. Two examples.

TRIM is a command that helps the operating system know precisely where the data that you want to move or delete is stored

TRIM has nothing to do with moving data.

whenever a delete command is issued by the operating system or the user, the SSD automatically sends a TRIM command to wipe the storage space being erased

SSD’s do not send TRIM commands, they receive them.

Alex5723 wrote:

TRIM replaces the need for block (4k) alignment, defrag

Nope, doesn’t do that either.

Here is the lowdown on defragmentation of an SSD from Scott Hanselman.
And the 4k boundary issue from MiniTool (Partition Wizard).

cheers, Paul

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jburk07, Jesse Farr, GreatAndPowerfulTech, Loonier, Mr. Austin, Alex5723

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Wow. I didn’t know about any of this. Thank you. Although I came up in a time of spinning discs three of our four home/office computers now have SSDs. As resident geek I wanted to know that I can just trust that Windows 10 to do whatever it’s supposed to and keep my data sorted out. Our iMac’s 1 TB Seagate Barracuda spinner just gave up its ghost after only three years and I had it replaced with a Samsung SSD by a shop that knows what it’s doing.

Human, who sports only naturally-occurring DNA ~ oneironaut ~ broadcaster

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To Anon: Windows 10 “optimizing” the SSD will simply Trim it, while it will defrag a hard drive. So, it’s safe.

GreatAndPowerfulTech

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Not quite true. Optimize does defragment when required.
It’s still safe to do.

cheers, Paul

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how about chkdsk? Is it OK to run that on a SSD?
My other machines had hard drives and I would run chkdsk periodically to be sure there were no bad sectors, lost segments, etc.

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Chkdsk /r is pointless on an SSD.

Chkdsk /f can be useful as it checks the file system, NTFS MFT index v. actual content, correct free space size, etc.

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WCHS wrote:

how about chkdsk? Is it OK to run that on a SSD?
My other machines had hard drives and I would run chkdsk periodically to be sure there were no bad sectors, lost segments, etc.

Just don’t touch the SSD. No defrag, no chkdsk, no “optimizing” apps… Just let the SSD be.

The only maintenance (needed) is checking, from time to time, for a new SSD’s firmware as it doesn’t autoupdate.

example : Samsung :

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Assuming the firmware update fixes something that will affect you.

cheers, Paul

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