Defrag Problem

[mimarsinan]

It appears there's a new problem with the Surface Pro 2017.

The defragmenter does *not* seem to recognize that an SSD is attached; instead trying to defragment the disk outright. Classic Microsoft snafu:

Does anybody know how I can get this thing to send trim commands to the SSD instead of defragmenting it like an HDD?

Thank you, Microsoft, for bringing problem upon problem with each new Surface release.

 

[convergent]

Did you initiate the defrag, or did it do on its own? How did you know it was trying?

 

[mimarsinan]

I initiated the defrag, or rather, tried to initiate a trim operation on the SSD.

When you do the exact same thing on a Surface Pro 4 (or any other Surface Book/Pro device - I have been through them all), the tool trims the SSD.

On this "great new version", the tool defragments the SSD, causing wear&tear for no reason and making everything worse trim-wise, which was the whole original point of the exercise to begin with!

Seriously, taken together with the blurry text regression in the SP4/SB timeline, this is MS's second major regression:

Blurry Text

They don't make computers like they used to.

If you could get an SP3 with 1 TB storage, I'd be downgrading to that by now.

Newer is hardly ever better with Microsoft - including their hardware, apparently!

 

[convergent]

I don't think that TRIM is something you need to initiate. It should be set to on, and it will then take care of itself, was my understanding. You can run "fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify" at the command line and if it returns that its set to zero for NTFS, then it is running TRIM. If it returns a 1, then it is not enabled and needs to be turned on. Its amazing how user friendly this is, right?

 

[mimarsinan]

It returns 0, however I don't know if this means Windows will be actually trimming when it doesn't think the underlying hardware is an SSD. Probably not!

Plus, I have always appreciated being able to manually trim. Sometimes you need to do just that...

Digging deeper into this, I've found out that the culprit is Storage Spaces:

This is kind of a Software RAID, and while we've had Dynamic Disks since Windows 2000, Windows 10 does now let you boot from a "dynamic disk" in RAID 0 Stripe mode - this is what Storage Spaces calls "Simple (no resiliency)". So far so good!

This would have been actually really nice, if Microsoft:

1) Had not downgraded the drive capacity of each drive unit down to 512 GB from the earlier 1 TB. In fact, there's even 2 TB M2 "gumsticks" available right now. Microsoft could have used the Storage Spaces to therefore offer a 4 GB, or at least a 2 GB Surface Pro 4 - now, that would have been something.

2) Had provided the ability to report the array as an SSD disk, instead of a custom mechanical disk.

For instance, the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (another mostly-software RAID) driver has been playing nice with TRIM for several years now.

In particular, you can manually TRIM with the "Defragment and Optimize Drives" tool on IRST arrays, and of course the automated type of OS trim you mentioned works fine as well.

And no, its not VMware