Windows 10 version 2004 defrags your SSD too often

There’s nothing wrong with defragmenting your drive once in a while to optimize your system’s speed.

However, if you updated to Windows 10 version 2004 and you’re using an SSD, you will notice that the system defragments your disk every day if you restart your computer.

It’s not recommended to defragment your SSD too often as it might result in shortening its life.

Why is Windows 10 defragging my SSD every day?

If you check the Automatic Maintenance feature in Windows 10, you will see that the OS performs some maintenance tasks based on a schedule. 

And these include, of course, checking the drives for optimization (defragging and trimming) and other diagnostics.

You can check that for yourself by going to Control Panel, then System and Security, and then clicking on the Security and Maintenance.

As you can see from our example, the Automatic Maintenance just run in the morning.

After it optimizes the drives, Windows 10 records the last time it did that so that it doesn’t perform the process too often.

However, as the members of WilderSecurity realized, after the release of Windows 10 2004, the Optimize Drives feature simply doesn’t remember the last time a drive has been optimized.

The drive needs optimization

And the proof is that when you go into Windows Defragger, you will notice that our SSD drive clearly points out that it needs optimization even though the optimization already run this morning.

Microsoft stated that with the Insider Preview Build 19551 they have fixed this issue:

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.

Well, it seems that it hasn’t been fixed yet, so Windows 10’s automatic maintenance will defrag an SSD drive more often than once a month, as it should.

There is a slight workaround for this. If you launch an optimization directly from the Optimize Drives, the SSD will only perform the Trim function and not defragging.

To learn more about this feature, we have a guide that answers if trimming SSD is safe, so don’t miss it.

Did you experience this problem? If so, let us know in the comments.