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A lot of us have heard before that you should "never defrag an SSD", but that seems to be only relevant for older Windows versions (like XP and below). Windows 7 and above seem to have enough understanding of how to work with SSDs to make it safe and beneficial to do routine (although not too often) defragmentation and consolidation.
This article claims that Windows (7+) should handle routine defragmentation on every installation automatically, and is enabled by default.
However, when I checked out my Windows 7's defragmenter application, it said that my 2 HDDs have been recently completely defragmented and consolidated, and that my SSD on which Windows is installed, has never even been analyzed. What gives?
I can't even select it for automatic defragmentation − neither the main, nor System Reserved partition.
But I was able to defragment it manually. It said it was >70% fragmented right after analysis, which from what I've read about random and sequential read speeds on SSDs means it could have been defragmented to improve system performance significantly.
Then I found this article from January 2009 on MSDN which says:
If solid-state media is detected, Windows disables defragmentation on that disk. The physical nature of solid-state media is such that defragmentation is not needed and in fact, could decrease overall media lifetime in certain cases.
But it's been years since then, and there have been countless updates released, and newer Windows versions have appeared, so it could have addressed by now.
Should I manually defragment my SSDs? Are there any known issues that would make it harmful on Windows 7? Additionally, what has changed between Windows 7 and 10 so that now it defragments SSDs?
user1306322
Posted 2016-11-28T19:28:55.333
Reputation: 4 237
I see 5 questions with an open ended title. That makes your "question" difficult to answer given this a Q&A site, not a discussion site. – Damon – 2016-11-28T19:39:17.247
"Is defragmentation still a bad idea" - It happens automatically every month on Windows 8+ installations. "If defragment, which tool to use and when to do it?" - This is a software recomendation, the default tool Optimize Drive, works just fine. "But how to find out if it has been enabled or ever run?" - See the exact article referenced in the duplicate question. "ow to see if it is needed and how to enable it (specifically in Windows 7, 8.1 and 10)?" - How you enable it is identical. You turn on volume snapshots. – Ramhound – 2016-11-28T20:19:25.860
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRealAndCompleteStoryDoesWindowsDefragmentYourSSD.aspx has some input on this question from the Windows Storage developers but it's two years old. Advice seems to be to let Windows 10 maintenance take care of TRIM and defrag if necessary. – David Marshall – 2016-11-28T20:27:12.330
The "controversy" probably derives from two competing goals: (1) Minimize wear of NAND flash cells. (2) Efficiencies (e.g. garbage collection, wear-leveling) gained by consolidating sectors of a file to the same NAND page. -- Defraging accomplishes the second goal but not the first. – sawdust – 2016-11-28T20:29:42.293
Now it's too broad – random – 2016-11-29T05:21:48.090
Edited to avoid duplication of the other popular question, and to reflect the issue I'm actually having – user1306322 – 2016-11-30T08:54:40.750