Defrag and Win 7

In my new Win 7 Pro system I have an Intel SSD as the root drive and 2 hdd in Raid1 for data. I have been told that defragging an SSD is bad news - I accept that view after researching a number of forums.

In that research I came across the info that Vista employs an auto defrag function on start up. Because I've jumped from Win XP to Win 7 and know nothing about Vista I don't know if that is for specified drives or all of them. However a poster showed a method where the registry could be edited to disable the auto function and thus prevent unnecessary wear on SSDs.

Does anyone know if Win 7 Pro has a similar auto defrag and what steps might be taken to neutralise it?

I'd appreciate any advice on this.

T.I.A.

Windows 7 should automatically switch defragmentation off for SSD drives.

As CBJ says this is one of the optimisations Windows 7 seems to perform reliably for SSDs.

Windows 7 is not clear though when you open up disk defragmenter. If you don't have any other disks where you need disk defragmenter then you can Stop and Disable it from Services within Computer Management.

If you still need the service to run, open Disk Defragmenter, and edit the schedule. The SSD should not be listed, and you should see that you can only select your mechanical disks.

That confirms my understanding BUT....
I went to Disk Defragmenter - and it showed my SSD. The narrative says as you advised 'Only disks that can be defragmented are shown'. So why should it be shown?

Out of curiosity I clicked on Defrag Disk and it produced some activity i.e pass 1, pass 2 etc before I stopped the process.

So I'm puzzled. I would have preferred the SSD not to have been available. Instead I have now disabled the auto run to make sure.

Do you have an SSD yourself? Does it list?

It's listed because you can defragment it if you want to. The switch referred to earlier turns off automatic defragmentation, not manual. And yes, my SSD drives are listed in the manual tool.

If you turn of scheduled defrags, isn't that enough? or does Windows do it anyway in the background???

CBJ, ChileanLlama, thanks for that.

titaniumx3 I've turned auto off now to make sure.