Ccleaner use with SSD (solid state drive)

[MCNorthAmerica]

I have looked in the topic "SSD and secure deletion options in CCleaner and Recuva Started by rjo98, Oct 22 2014 02:42 AM" and this does not seem to answer my question. Could the community or a Piriform staff member address my question (below).  If this has been addressed, please point me in the right direction in the Piriform Forums.

 

I am a novice PC user & I use Ccleaner (Professional Edition).  I recently upgraded to a PC with a SSD for my "C" drive as well as other data drives in my system (internal & external connected by USB).  In addition I have a HDD (internal) for another data drive as well.  I have read that SSD's do not operate in the same way as HDDs with regard to data over writing & erasing. 

 

QUESTION: Does Ccleaner take these differences in to account when it operates in a system that has SSDs or a mix of SSDs & HDDs??  Can a user chose an "SSD option" in Ccleaner? ( I've looked for this & have not seen it). Or, is Ccleaner not suitable in a system with SSDs??

[mta]

in brief, CC treats SSD's and HDD's the same on the crap removal front.

deleting temp files, browser history, dumps, log files etc is the same process no matter the storage medium.

it's mainly on the need to defrag and the way NAND storage is accessed when deleting/recovering that SSD's differ, and of course their lightning speed.

[Augeas]

I would add don't use secure file deletion. If you have a TRIM enabled O/S and SSD (which, being new, I assume you have) then TRIM does a secure deletion for you.

[Tramspeed73]

Hello,

There appears to be much blog commentary that CCleaner is not suitable for SSD's. Yet I figure that just one simple pass  ... 'Simple Overwrite (1 pass)', would be perfectly sufficient due to the nature of SSD's, and your comment that ... 'in brief, CC treats SSD's and HDD's the same on the crap removal front deleting temp files, browser history, dumps, log files etc is the same process no matter the storage medium'.

Referring to these two previous comments below, can you please explain how I get this 'TRIM' to work, or maybe how CCleaner would do that for me? I can't find any reference to 'TRIM' in CCleaner. The only relevant thing seems to be when I select an SSD to be cleaned, then I get a warning about not doing that. So how can I clean the SSD unused areas using CCleaner? That is, to make sure they're free of any traces of data?

Thanks.

On ‎4‎/‎9‎/‎2016 at 16:58, Augeas said:

I would add don't use secure file deletion. If you have a TRIM enabled O/S and SSD (which, being new, I assume you have) then TRIM does a secure deletion for you.

...

On ‎4‎/‎9‎/‎2016 at 06:29, mta said:

it's mainly on the need to defrag and the way NAND storage is accessed when deleting/recovering that SSD's differ, and of course their lightning speed.

 

[Andavari]

Assuming you're using Windows 10 it automatically runs Trim on the drive, it replaces a traditional defrag with Trim. In the Cortana/Search area type in Optimize, then click the found result 'Defragment and Optimize Drives'.

If it's properly configured to automatically optimize with a schedule it will state it's turned on near the bottom under the text 'Scheduled optimization." You can also run Trim anytime you feel necessary (it doesn't hurt the SSD) by selecting a single drive or all drives (hold down CTRL key to enable the ability to select all drives) and click Optimize.

[Augeas]

CCleaner is quite suitable for use on SSDs in its base objective, 'cleaning' junk files, which is a simple delete. The architecture of NAND flash make overwriting pages and blocks impossible for any software. Thus a secure delete, or a free space wipe (both of which overwrite pages) are pointless to attempt and impossible to execute.

To add to Andavari's post, I think TRIM was available from Vista onwards, and SSD controllers have supported TRIM for I guess at least the last five years. The default is enabled. Win10 runs regular TRIMs for you by default.

You may wish to use Recuva to look at your deleted files. Although you will still see a list of deleted file names (they're held in the MFT) if you switch to advanced mode and look at the file header you will see that they are all zeroes, even if you haven't used secure deleteion or wipe free space. That is the effect of TRIM, and may reassure you.

[Andavari]

Nah, Vista didn't support it, it's Windows 7 and newer only, but I think Windows 7 had to have some update installed to eventually include.

Really the Trim command should just be programmed and baked into every SSD made without the need for some outside source to run it. Shouldn't need to have a software scheduled to do it since the software is essentially dumb and may miss a scheduled trim for weeks, while on the otherhand the SSD knows about itself and should be smart enough to maintain itself in my opinion - would make SSD longevity a non-issue on OSes (old and newer unpopular variety) and hardware (game consoles, etc.,) that don't have a software invoked Trim command available.

[mta]

for anyone interested, type this command to test is TRIM of ON; fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify
Disabled means it's ON.

and this command from an elevated command prompt to do a TRIM; defrag %systemdrive% /L /V

[Augeas]

 

22 hours ago, Andavari said:

Really the Trim command should just be programmed and baked into every SSD made without the need for some outside source to run it.

Unfortunately the reason why we have TRIM makes this impossible. There is no indication to the SSD controller that a page has been deleted. The deletion is executed by a change to the bit status in the cluster bit map metafile. Whilst the controller can see that a page has been updated, it doesn't know that the page is a bitmap, or what a bitmap is - or what a file is for that matter. So the O/S has to tell the SSD what to do, with TRIM.