Forum Discussion
Ummm why is Windows defragmenting my SSD
Setting up a new PC, clean W11 install, I was trying to perform the maintenance and cleanup stuff. From "Security and Maintenance" applet in Control Panel, I manually invoked/started "Maintenance" that is normally a scheduled background task, and walked away for at least 10 minutes. Came back and it was still running. I have noticed it before where invoking this manually takes a long time compared to when it runs as scheduled task, but never really looked into it.
I happened to be checking my "drives" status and was going to run optimize or TRIM. I have no spinners in this PC. I open the 'Optimize' window and see it is already doing something. I now know what was taking so long, Windows was DEFRAGMENTING my SSD.
I sat and watched it go up to PASS #5, first defragmenting then consolidating, until I force stopped it. WTF?
2 Replies
Back up the important data and leave it alone. no need to worry too much
On older systems or setups, Windows sometimes defaults to defragmenting drives, thinking they’re HDDs. But SSDs don’t need traditional defragging — it doesn’t improve performance and can actually wear them out faster. Instead, SSDs use TRIM commands to keep themselves in shape.
