New bug discovered in Windows 10 2004, that is the famous May Update that still many users have to receive. This time the error doesn’t prevent you from using the computer or any peripheral, nor does it crash the operating system, but it’s still not to be underestimated.
The bug consists in the fact that Windows 10 keeps asking the user to defragment the hard disk, even when there is an SSD disk on the computer which, as it is known, should not be defragmented. But that’s not all: even if there is a traditional hard drive Windows tries to run the Trim command on it, which is instead a command that can only be used on SSDs. This also happens quite persistently, so much so that some users report that the operating system invites them to run the defragmentation almost every time they reboot. The cause of the problem is trivial, to say the least, but Microsoft hasn’t fixed the bug yet: it will do so in a later update, in which there will also be solutions to the many other bugs that have popped up since the May Update.
Why Windows wants to defragment the SSD disk
The Windows 10 operating system normally records the last optimization of each disk drive in the computer, to prevent the optimization from being launched too often causing a prolonged impact on the computer’s performance. Apparently, however, Windows 10 2004 does not properly record the date and time of the last disk optimization and, as a result, it believes that the disk always needs to be defragmented. But that’s not all: Windows also forgets the type of disk in use on the computer, asking for defragmentation of SSD disks and running the Trim command on traditional disks.
Why SSDs should not be defragmented
Defragmenting an SSD disk is not only useless, but even potentially harmful. In fact, these disks are actually memory cards with numerous chips side by side. The data to be written is spread across as many chips as possible in order to maximize the speed of writing and reading data (while one chip is busy delivering one piece of data, other data is coming from other chips). Defragmenting a disk means “compacting” the data all next to each other, which is actually useful on magnetic platter disks. But not on an SSD: performance goes down instead of up. But that’s not all: every data read and write operation on an SDD ruins the memory chips, shortening their useful life. This means that running a defragmentation on an SSD is twice as bad.