Defrag Blocked

Lady Fitzgerald · 24 Nov 2013

Curious. I don't remember C: (an SSD) showing up on the initial screen but, then again, I'm old and losing it. I have Defrag disabled right now and I'm too lazy to re-enable it to check. I do remember that it was missing from the Scheduling screen. It doesn't matter, anyway, since, when I do turn it back on, I'm going to set it to automatically defrag my spinners only daily at 1-2 AM.

carwiz · 24 Nov 2013

Here's another shot of the first screen with a DVD and USB thumb drive inserted. Notice that the USB drive can be defragmented but not the DVD. This is why it says "only disks that can be defragmented are shown". The DVD can't but everything else can, including SSDs. (On this screen) You just can't schedule a defrag on a SSD.

carwiz · 24 Nov 2013

Clear as mud? :)

Lady Fitzgerald · 24 Nov 2013

carwiz said:

Clear as mud? :)

Clearer. :)

Ranger4 · 24 Nov 2013

carwiz said:

Here's another shot of the first screen with a DVD and USB thumb drive inserted. Notice that the USB drive can be defragmented but not the DVD. This is why it says "only disks that can be defragmented are shown". The DVD can't but everything else can, including SSDs. (On this screen) You just can't schedule a defrag on a SSD.

Your screen shots certainly show that your drive C, the SSD, is not shown in the defrag schedule, but I see that it shows 11% fragmented. I assume from that information it receives a regular analysing at the time you have set for the other discs to be defragged.

The question I have to ask is. Does analysing cause a lot of disc reads & writes. If it does then it would seem that very little has been changed from a complete defrag.

As far a can see the only way around that is to manually defrag each disc & not the SSD.

Any thoughts would be very welcome, purely from a knowledge point of view.

Lady Fitzgerald · 24 Nov 2013

Reads won't hurt an SSD; it's excessive writes that will shorten an SSDs life. As far as I know, analyzing a disk for the amount of fragmentation is a read only operation. It doesn't matter how fragmented an SSD gets since there are no heads having to frequently change direction, jumping like a toad on a hot road all over the platters, to recover all the parts of a fragmented file. The SSD controller can handle that with no trouble at all.

kbrady1979 · 24 Nov 2013

My Intel X25-M SSD has over 7TB of writes on it and is still at 99% life.........I think these days most people are worried for nothing about the lifespan of an SSD.

Lady Fitzgerald · 24 Nov 2013

kbrady1979 said:

My Intel X25-M SSD has over 7TB of writes on it and is still at 99% life.........I think these days most people are worried for nothing about the lifespan of an SSD.

True that (and I was one of those

). Controller failure is far more likely to take out an SSD before its time than wearing out cells. Frequently defragging an SSD will contribute to shorter SSD life, however.

kbrady1979 · 24 Nov 2013

That it will

carwiz · 24 Nov 2013

Ranger4 said:

Your screen shots certainly show that your drive C, the SSD, is not shown in the defrag schedule, but I see that it shows 11% fragmented. I assume from that information it receives a regular analysing at the time you have set for the other discs to be defragged.

The question I have to ask is. Does analysing cause a lot of disc reads & writes. If it does then it would seem that very little has been changed from a complete defrag.

As far a can see the only way around that is to manually defrag each disc & not the SSD.

Any thoughts would be very welcome, purely from a knowledge point of view.

It doesn't cost anything to do an analysis. It's read only. Below is a snip of one I just performed a few minutes ago on the C drive. It took all of about 5-6 seconds on a 120Gb. (Although I didn't actually time it, I just counted.) The dates for each drive are independent of each other. The date changes only when you do an analysis or a defrag.