Windows 8.1 System Reserved drive needs optimisation, won't optimise

Question

Is there a definitive answer as to what to do when the Windows 8.1 "Optimize Drives" tool reports that:

• System Reserved drive needs optimization, and optimization has never run
• When one runs optimization manually, it runs briefly, fails, and returns to the "never run" state.

Should this be ignored? Should optimization be turned off? Might Windows Update change the optimization behavior at some point in the future? Could this have any performance impact?

This question makes some general points about SSDs, and this question reports a very similar issue without any apparent resolution. I also found this discussion on Microsoft Technet that discusses this specific issue, and has some points marked as answers, but those answers aren't very clear, and they seem to contradict other contributions.

Answer 1

You can ignore this glitch. System reserved drive usually are very little used, mainly at boot (and not in all configurations). It usually not written during use so trim operation are not necessary (because lack of write it is no freed blocks to trim). So it doesn't have any performance impact. If you want you can disable that optimisation, it is useless.