OK. I just used Defraggler to optimize my SSD boot drive and it's acting really weird. When I start up windows it now takes nearly a minute for it to finish up and "start" windows. Blank screen and missing icons, but I can see the background and mouse pointer.
After it finishes booting, my hard drive activity light is constantly flashing. I check defraggler and I see the used space of the drive constantly going up, and the free space going down as if it's writing to the drive for some reason and continually doing so. it won't stop!
What the heck did Defraggler do to my drive? Did it screw up something and am I messed up entirely now? I don't have the money to replace the drive and redo everything for my computer.
Does it do it all the time - I restarted a few times and it did it every time, but somehow the last time after restarting it didn't. Booting up as fast as it normally did before I ran the optimization.
Safe Mode - Haven't tried it.
I think it might've still been taking care of the garbage that the zero-fill had created. But I am not 100% sure on that.
- Looks like the VSS Service is busy. When Windows detects that Defraggler is being run then somehow it triggers the VSS Service. The VSS Service makes a copy of important files on your HD or SSD. And VSS is a Service/task/process that's run in the background while the user is doing something else. After VSS has completed its tasks then the folder "C:\System Volume Information" has increased in size.
(Does anyone know how to pull up the size of that particular folder ?)
- When you've got a SSD then I would recommend to NEVER defragment/optimize that particular drive. A SSD drive is already faster than a HDD even WITHOUT optimization. Additionally optimizing/defragmenting a SSD will reduce the lifetime of a SSD.
@the Defraggler developers: I would recommend to ALWAYS (temporarily) disable the VSS when Defraggler is busy defragmenting a drive.
I believe that the Defraggler SSD Optimise is a zero-fill operation, so you may well see the free space shrinking as the process continues. In my opinion on a modern SSD with TRIM you would hardly ever need to optimise, perhaps yearly.
Maybe not, but I believe that when you request a Defraggler SSD optimize you will get a message saying:
'Optimize operation will zero-fill your drive. This may reduce your drive freespace temporarily during this operation. Do you want to continue?'
Well, that's wfs in other rather ungrammatical words. The Win8 optimise is a global TRIM, a different kettle of fish.
From betanews.com:
Also new in Defraggler 4.18 is a new Quick Optimize option for SSD drives to accompany the Optimize option. The Optimize feature uses a zero-filling technique on empty drive space to improve write performance on SSD drives and versions of Windows (specifically XP) that don’t support the TRIM command.