Windows 2020-08 Cumulative Update

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Hi

I seen many posts on some website saying the windows update is bugged cozing the ssd to keep defraging. so is this true ?
have it been fixed (i heard only insider got fix so far) ?
how bad is it ? if I keep the settings as it is and let it defrag with this bug ?

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https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4571744/windows-10-update-kb4571744

KB4571744 apparently fixes the problem.

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Weird so they went from always marking SSD as needeing degfrag, even if you did it just minutes ago, to just constantly defragging it?? WTG, MSFT. -_-

Apparently 2004 borked it by causing Windows to “forget” that it had defragged/run Trim on drives. So if drive maintenance/optimization is set to automatic it would constantly run these tasks.

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SSDs don’t need to defrag (<.<)"

OIC, thanks, so having it set to just do it weekly won’t do that?

I think they need to trim though, which is what it does if you ‘defrag’ in Windows 10?

I read somewhere that Microsoft does do some amount of defrag even on SSDs. Files with ridiculous amounts of fragments get rewritten, and something to do with the MFT.

Yes TRIM is “needed” to keep the SSDs in good enough health/performance over time, defrag however moves pieces of files to be closther together which in turn is a write operation which reduces the overall lifespan of the NAND flash cells.

Afaik TRIM is issued as a queue operation when certain operations are requested or done through the OS automatically. I sadly haven’t found a real good source for that.

On windows 10, the optimize button trims SSDs, while it defrags HDDs.
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Or, at least it is supposed to.

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I updated my windows now, it seems like they fixed it , so far I dont detect the ssd defraging all the time as ppl reported.

Ps: I didn’t update to 2020 version before , and I was on 1909 and just updated to the latest release of today date.

Filesystems need to de-frag if they are sufficiently full otherwise you can run out of free clusters, never mind what the layout is. i.e., defrag is not really a performance thing on SSD, but the filesystem running on top can suffer fragmentation and lose the ability to write.

Have seen it under NTFS on an old database server. Had 10-20% free space, could not write to disk due to fragmentation. Essentially free space was scattered over so many fragments that it couldn’t be used due to filesystem issues. De-frag fixed it.

So whilst de-frag is less essential on SSD and likely you’ll get away with never needing it, if you run your filesystems pretty full and do a lot of read/write you can eventually trip NTFS up.

This would be why MS are still de-fragging SSDs periodically. Never mind that this patch fucked that up, and does it too much :smiley:

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That was my guess but wasn’t sure of . As I did search around hut didn’t find anyone saying what you said.

But you confirmed my theory , I did think that windows do defrag ssd’s normally on normal times to avoid that issue.

Yeah the big thing is free space.

SSD defrag strategy is/should be to focus on consolidation of free space. Small amounts of file fragmentation aren’t a big deal as you don’t really pay an access speed penalty whereas on spinning disk the penalty can be huge.

HD de-frag strategy is/was to consolidate files into contiguous chunks and place those chunks as close to the start of the disk as possible where the outer tracks have a faster read/write rate. AND try to consolidate free space in the process of doing that :slight_smile: