Windows 10 2004 optimization/defrag bug

I'm not sure if the problem was there before the 2004 update, I never really paid much attention to it until I became aware of the recent issue with the defrag/TRIM system.
After a reboot it did say that the drive was 0% fragmented, so I supposed that was a good sign.

It passed chkdsk fine, that's the first thing I checked to make sure there was no corruption on the drive!

I have a dual boot system, with Windows 10 and Windows XP, and I've tried running the Windows XP defragger on the drive, and it said it was still quite fragmented, so I guess the Windows 10 one didn't actually do its job.

The Windows XP defragger is now defragmenting it (taking ages) and when it's finished I will try running the Windows 10 one again to see if the result is any different now the drive should actually be defragmented.

Thanks, Dave.

The defrag finally completed in XP. It said it had done, but then carried on with what looked like a second pass, where again it stuck on 1% completed for ages. I guess that is the same process as on Windows 10 but it doesn't call the second pass "consolidation" as Windows 10 does.

Anyway, it eventually finished, and Windows 10 says the drive now doesn't need defragmentation, so I guess everything is OK.

I'd just like to offer a word of caution here. (it may never affect you, but)

Prior to Windows 10 I would dual boot using removeable caddies and my second hard drive was common between the two operating systems. (both windows) After some time I swapped the caddie and found the drive was no longer accessible to the older operating system. It seemed the newer one had done something the old on didn't like any more. I think the newer operating system was Windows 7 but I can't remember the older one.

Some users believe that it’s not sensible to defrag the SSDs at all, but Microsoft experts have previously stated that Windows 10 does defragment your SSDs on purpose and it’s normal.

Typically, SSD is defragged once a month by default if you’ve Volume Shadow Copy feature enabled. Volume Shadow Copy is enabled when you manually turn on Windows System Restore, which is a feature that basically allows you to roll back to a previous version of the OS.

To facilitate the drives optimization process, Windows 10 comes with a tool called “Optimize Drives” that would record the last time a drive has been optimized/defragged/trimmed.

Windows also use the Automatic Maintenance feature to automate the defragmentation or optimization process.

Windows 10’s Automatic Maintenance is a feature that helps to keep your computer healthy with automated system optimizations when required. During its casual run, this feature will run specific maintenance tasks, such as security scans, system scans, and disk optimization or defragmentation.

The Automatic Mainataince feature relies on the “Optimize Drives” tool to see if the drives need to optimized (defragged when required). With May 2020 Update (version 2004), Microsoft broke the Optimize Drives (aka defragmentation tool) and the defrag tool was unable to flag that it’s already done a scheduled optimization on your SSD.

Just an update aside on this.

It looks as if things still aren't quite right.

I'm seeing this error recorded regularly in the event log -

"The storage optimiser couldn't complete re-trim on CAPTURE (F:) because: This operation is not supported on this file system. (0x89000020)"

You might be interested to know that my drive F: is a FAT32 formatted hard disk drive, not an SSD!

So, even though it appears as an HDD in the list of drives, it looks as if the system might be still trying to TRIM it!

Windows 10 can't TRIM FAT32 SSDs, but it can defrag FAT32 HDDs.

I have another FAT32 drive on the system which is not throwing the error.

Cheers, Dave.