No disk clean-up button?

I just noticed my boot drive has no "disk clean-up" button. It's an SSD. Is this something Windows 7 is doing because the drive is an SSD? Is it saying "you don't want to do needless erasing of harmless files"? What is going on here?

Here it is next to my D drive for reference. I do have system restore off but it should still be there for icons and temp files. Is this the case with everybody who has system restore off or does it have to do with the disk itself?

Hi Nate,

Strange, I have the Disk Cleanup button for my SSD drive. Running Disk Cleanup on a SSD drive is fine, but you do not want to run a disk defragmenter on one since it will shorten the SSD's lifespan.

What SSD drive do you have, and how do you have it connected? We can see if others with the same setup are experiencing the same thing.

Hey Brink, I have a Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD. It's connected to the motherboard, my board has two controllers. The normal one and 2 SATA ports controlled by a Gigabyte chip. I have it hooked to the normal ones in AHCI mode. I can also bring it up by typing "disk cleanup" in the search box and it gives me the option of all my disks. I can do it this way but it's odd that it's gone.

Nate,

I have my drives only connected to the yellow SATA ports (Intel) on my Gigabyte motherboard.

Have you already update the firmware and installed the Trim utility software for the SSD?

Patriot Memory - Support

Brink said:

Nate,

I have my drives only connected to the yellow SATA ports (Intel) on my Gigabyte motherboard.

Have you already update the firmware and installed the Trim utility software for the SSD?

Patriot Memory - Support

Yes I have mine connected to the #0 port on one of the 6 yellow Intel ports. I have the updated firmware and the "Performance restore" utility. I don't know if it's TRIM. I have done both. It's up to date. It's running great too!

logicearth said:

It is probably that way because Disk Cleanup can shorten the life of an SSD if it is done multiple times. So taking the Disk Clean out from the main Properties page would help it from being used all the time.

Any time there is writing to the SSD, it will shorten its lifespan.

This was what I assumed at first, but I have never heard of this and if Brink has a comparable SSD and his is there....it doesn't make any sense. Also, I cannot find anything on the web about this. There are a couple of us out there but nothing has been resolved that I can see.

logicearth said:

So what happens is this: read-erase-write. Both erase, and write take a slice from the the life of an SSD.

I understand the downside of an SSD. The upside is FAR greater. That's why pretty much everybody wants one. I would never go back to normal hard disks now. It's the best upgrade you can do for almost any system.

You could be right. That was my first guess. The question is: Why is my button not there and Brinks button is there.

BTW-If you really want to get to know SSDs read this.
AnandTech: The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ

And here is a list of great (Intel,Samsung) good (indilinx) and one step down (JMicron, dual JMicron) controllers and which drives they are.

Nate,

I'm not sure why I have the button and you do not when we both have a SSD. I would say that it may be since yours is a newer model than my older Patriot SSD, then Windows 7 may detect and work with it better to automatically set all of the optimizations for a SSD.

Well thanks for looking into it. I have noticed more things today out of the ordinary. I decided to install the RTM version. I just finished up. I installed it on a normal 640GB disk just to test it out. I will get this version on the SSD in the next week or so and see if everything is the same as before. You may be right. My SSD has a different controller from yours. They are different models.