Myth: you must turn off Optimize Drives because Windows 'defrags' your SSD

Myth: you must turn off Optimize Drives because Windows 'defrags' your SSD — via Scott Hanselman

MythNeeds adminWindows 11Windows 10

Windows knows when a drive is an SSD. On SSDs Optimize Drives mainly sends retrim, and it only defragments occasionally when fragmentation gets bad enough to cause problems (for example with System Restore snapshots). Turning it off can do more harm than good.

What to do instead

Leave the scheduled task on: Start → type Defragment and Optimize Drives → make sure Scheduled optimization is On.
The drive list shows the media type (Solid state drive / Hard disk drive), so you can confirm Windows has detected your SSD correctly.

Scott Hanselman's write-up, prepared with the Windows storage team, explains that heavy fragmentation can hit file-system metadata limits and slow volume shadow copy, which is why Windows occasionally defrags an SSD on purpose. Retrim catches up on TRIM requests that were dropped.

Sources

The real and complete story - Does Windows defragment your SSD? — by Scott Hanselman

Source reviewed: 2026-11-02
Link checked: 2026-11-02
Tested hands-on: Not by Oddbyte.Me

Oddbyte.Me hasn't tried this on every Windows build, so keep the undo handy.

ssddefragtrimretrimoptimize drivesmyth

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MythAdmin

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Myth: you must turn off Optimize Drives because Windows 'defrags' your SSD — via Scott Hanselman

What to do instead

Sources

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