DISK OPTIMIZATION On Server 2012 Is Different From Server 2016 / 2019

Question

I understand how modern DISK OPTIMIZATION works, in fact I wrote https://www.urtech.ca/2022/02/solved-does-windows-defrag-ssds-what-is-ssd-optimization/ explaining that many people are wrong about it. However, I have found an oddity with my clients over the years that older server OS's like SERVER 2012R2 will show BOTH:

1 - NEEDS OPTIMIZATION
2 - DRIVES ARE BEING OPTIMIZED AUTOMATICALLY (I have confirmed that the task is being run in TASK SCHED)

Note all of the servers I am speaking of are either HyperV (including those in Azure) or VWMare VM's.

Newer OS' like SERVER 2016 and SERVER 2019 do not exhibit this conflict. Soooo, all of that gets to the question, should I OPTIMIZE the disk manually or just continue to ignore it.

I get that conventional wisdom is to not defrag SSD's even though as I explain in https://www.urtech.ca/2022/02/solved-does-windows-defrag-ssds-what-is-ssd-optimization/ that is sometimes incorrect.

Is this just a difference in the algorithm used in SERVER 2012 vs SERVER 2022 and if so, is it a good idea to OPTIMIZE (includes RETRIM & DEFRAG) every few years when fragementation gets ugly)

Answer 1

The sentence "Drives are being optimized automatically" is just a description, means selected disks will be optimized via scheduled optimization. However, scheduled optimization may not run if there are tasks running on the server.

If the virtual disk of the VM is on a SSD, you should disable the schedule in the client OS when Optimize Drives detect the disk as "Hard disk drive".