The SSD Wear and Tear
Windows 10 includes a built-in maintenance tool called “Drive Optimizer” (formerly Disk Defragmenter). By default, this tool is scheduled to run every single week in the background. While defragmenting is incredibly important for older, mechanical spinning hard drives (HDDs) to keep them reading data quickly, it is actively harmful to modern Solid State Drives (SSDs).
SSDs do not have spinning platters or read heads; they access data instantly regardless of where it is physically stored on the chips. Defragmenting an SSD does not speed it up at all. Instead, the process of constantly moving and rewriting data simply burns through the drive’s limited write cycles, effectively shortening its lifespan. While modern Windows is usually smart enough to just run a TRIM command on SSDs instead of a full defrag, it’s safer to ensure the automatic defragmentation schedule is entirely disabled for your SSD.
How to Stop Automatic Defragmentation
You can adjust the schedule directly in the Drive Optimizer application.
- Click the Start button, type
Defragment and Optimize Drives, and press Enter. - A window will appear listing all the hard drives connected to your PC.
- Look at the bottom of the window under the “Scheduled optimization” section. Click the Change settings button.
- Uncheck the box that says Run on a schedule (recommended) to disable the feature entirely for all drives.
- Alternatively, if you have both an SSD and an HDD and want to keep the schedule running only for the HDD, click the Choose button next to “Drives.”
- In the next window, uncheck the box next to your Solid State Drive (C:), but leave your mechanical drive checked.
- Click OK on all windows to save your changes.
Your SSD will no longer be subjected to weekly, unnecessary read/write cycles, ensuring its flash memory lasts as long as possible.