SSD Disk Defrag on Windows 7

[kes166]

Hello,

There is a service that is running in services.msc called Disk Defragmenter with a description "Provide Disk Defragment capabilities." If I look in msconfig under services, it's also listed in there with a check mark in the box.

Now if I look in the Event Viewer in Windows Log > Application and scroll through it, there are several events listed as Defrag (Screenshot attached). Now it doesn't appear that these are complete disk defrags; however, this laptop is a SSD and doing a disk defrag is pointless not to mention it can actually harm the hard drive.

Does anyone have any idea what this event is doing when it runs or boots? I've looked to see what the service actually does but can't find anything other than it allows defrag to run.

[kes166]

Well, I answered my own question. In short, it defrags the boot sectors only to increase boot speed. I have no idea if it's really worth in but that's what it does.

In case anyone is curious to the longer answer:

It turns out if I go to disk defragmentor and click on configure schedule, it's marked to run at a particular time, in my case every Wednesday. Digging a little deeper, I found that windows does indeed see it's a SSD and defrags only the boot sector and stores what was done in c:\windows\prefetch folder. The last time this was ran can also be found in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Prefetcher\LastDiskLayoutTimeString

which coinsides with the time in the latest run in the event viewer log.

There's more info on this at http://www.autoitconsulting.com/site/performance/windows-7-self-optimizing-boot-process/ but it doesn't explain if it's for an SSD, a HHD, or both.

[CimmerianX]

You do NOT want to defrag an SSD. There is no need for it and you will probably just shorten the drive's lifespan.