Windows 10 Bug Slowly Wrecking Your SSD

SSD

Alert! Alert! A nasty little bug in Windows 10 could be slowly damaging your SSD. It causes the operating system to defragment your solid-state drives more often than needed.

And while a periodic defragging of an HDD is a good thing, since they are mechanical in nature, doing it too often on SSDs can actually degrade their integrity and shorten their lifespan. That is because the NAND flash memory cells can only be written to so many times.

In other words, you risk failure of your hardware if you defragment your SSD needlessly.

Getting back to the bug, then.

As spotted, when Redmond rolled out the Windows 10 May 2020 Update, it introduced this bug to the Optimize Drives feature causing it to incorrectly determine the last time a drive has been optimized. As a result, the OS has been defragging your SSD each time you reboot your system.

Yikes!

Windows 10 is usually able to discern whether to defrag or run a harmless TRIM process on a drive, depending on its type. But if volume snapshots are enabled, it will defrag the drive even if it is an SSD.

Luckily, the software titan has a fix in place, which has already been implemented for Insiders, and should make its way out for the general public with an upcoming update.

“Thank you for reporting that the Optimize Drives Control Panel was incorrectly showing that optimization hadn’t run on some devices. We’ve fixed it in this build.”

At this point, your best bet to sidestep the issue is to turning off this feature altogether. Type Defrag and Optimize Drives in the Windows 10 search box, then highlight your SSD. Click the Change settings link, and then uncheck Run on a schedule.

Hang tight!

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