When Microsoft introduced Windows 10 2004 earlier this year, it sent an errata that could shorten the lifespan of your SSD, depending on how often you restart your machine. The good news is that a solution is on the way and that the issue should not have caused too many issues between now and then when the update crashed, unless you are corrupting your PC (and your SSD) much, much more than your typical Windows user.
First, here’s the description of the bug itself: Windows 10 2004 shipped with a problem where the system stopped recording time since the SSD was last defragged. Reboot your machine again, and the operating system forgets how long it is and will immediately restart defrag attempts. This has been treated as possible damage to a solid state drive, and I will not claim it could not, but the chance that this will cause meaningful problems is unlikely. Here’s why: While it’s true that defragging an SSD every time you restart it is not great for it, SSDs are just like hard disks in one respect: the more often you defragment them, the less work each individual defragment has to do. .
Image shows Windows 10 2004. Image by BleepingComputer
This does not mean that the drive is not practiced unnecessarily, but the amount of NAND flash likely to be practiced in a given defrag session will be small. Several publications have implied that these extra defrags form the drive to “slowly kill,” but by this interpretation, so does any writing management. If you restart your machine every day, your SSD will be defragged a few dozen times then needed. If you’re like most people these days with a reasonably stable computer and you only restart when needed – my own last reboot was about two weeks ago – then your drive is a bare handful of times more defragmented than it otherwise would have been.
When SSDs first began to enter the market, this kind of precaution was much more important. Operating systems like Windows Vista do not support features like TRIM of course, and we regularly recommend that people use features like Secure Erase under Linux to restore disks to full factory performance between OS installations or even after heavy use. Because drives were much smaller, it was expected that the amount of wear on a given NAND cell would be higher over time. The various algorithms that protect SSDs against too fast values by reducing write gain were in their infancy. For all these reasons, reviewers and analysts were fairly cautious about the risk of running write rounds on a drive and the associated chance of data loss.
More than a decade later, however, SSDs have not proven to have the kinds of longevity problems we once feared they might. In general, data retention of drive and NAND reliability have not been issues, although of course SSDs still fail and people have suffered problems with data loss. But even TLC drives have shown that they have overall durability and most people do not reboot their computers as much. Grab the upgrade as it drops – reducing SSD wear and tear is always a good thing – but do not sweat the idea of a little more defragging than normal. The chance that this is causing a major problem is small. Build 19042,487 is already fixed in the beta channel, and the same fixes are expected to be extended to 2004 users in short order.
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