In this post, we will see how Windows 11/10/8 treats Defragmentation on Solid-State Drives. A Solid State Drive or SSD is a relatively new kind of drive, which consists of an array of flash memory modules similar to a flash drive. This means that when data is written to the SSD, it cannot be overwritten in place and must be written elsewhere until the block can be garbage collected – i.e. they can be written to at a byte level but need to erase at a block level. They are offered in different versions, for example, as a pure Flash or hybrid plates, which combine a traditional hard drive with a solid-state memory and have several advantages over the Hard Disk Drives and their popularity is on the rise.

Defragmentation and SSD

In Windows 7, Microsoft had turned off defragmentation for Solid State Disks. In Windows 11/10/8 however, since the Disk Defragmenter tool has undergone a change into a general disk optimization tool, you will see it enabled by default for SSDs too. In this scenario, where an SSD is present, the improved disk optimization tool sends ‘TRIM’ hints for the entire volume. A traditional defrag is not performed on SSDs in Windows 11/10/8.

You can read more on this topic and our post titled – Do you need to defrag SSD? What happens if you defrag it?

Disable Defragmentation SSD

You therefore really do not need to disable defrag for Solid State Drives in Windows 10. Nevertheless, if you would like to disable Windows defragmentation for Solid State Drive, you can do so as follows:

Open Windows Explorer and right-click on the Solid State Drive disk. Select Properties and press the Tools tab.

Here, under Optimize and defragment drive, click on the Optimize button. The Optimize Drives box will open. Click on the Change settings box.

Uncheck the Run on a schedule check-box and Click OK.

Defragmentation will be disabled on your Windows computer.

Tomorrow, we will see how Windows treats Prefetch and SuperFetch on Solid State Drives.