The only documentation page dedicated to defragmenting currently does not mention that when an HDD has been full disk encrypted, Windows does not allow defragmentating the disk via "Defragment and Optimize Drives" because their status will always be "Optimization not available", no matter if it's mounted or unmounted. I had to figure this out myself via a 10 year old forum post after ~15 min of troubleshooting. Based on searching, I don't believe this is mentioned in the docs anywhere or in the FAQ.
To save the trouble for the sizeable percentage of users who will want to defragment their drives at one point or another, I believe it would be helpful to expand the documentation to:
-
take note of this major caveat (cannot defrag via the GUI they are used to) to warn users that there isn't anything wrong with their devices or Veracrypt settings, rather it's expected behavior
-
inform users that in order to defrag their drives they need to toggle two checkboxes: (Veracrypt settings -> performance/driver configuration -> under Driver Configuration tick "Enable extended disk control codes support" and "Allow Windows Disk Defragmenter to defragment non-system partition/drive
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clarify whether Windows' "Automatic Maintenance" performs defragmentation on FDE disks - I'm not sure about the answer to this, but I would guess no?
-
clarify that in the case of FDE the drive needs to be mounted in order to start defragmenting
Is this something that makes sense to include in the documentation? If given the clear and clarification on what pages to edit and in what manner I would be open to opening a PR, but anyone can PR it I don't mind, I just hope to have this glaring issue to be clarified in the docs to prevent frustration for users.
The only documentation page dedicated to defragmenting currently does not mention that when an HDD has been full disk encrypted, Windows does not allow defragmentating the disk via "Defragment and Optimize Drives" because their status will always be "Optimization not available", no matter if it's mounted or unmounted. I had to figure this out myself via a 10 year old forum post after ~15 min of troubleshooting. Based on searching, I don't believe this is mentioned in the docs anywhere or in the FAQ.
To save the trouble for the sizeable percentage of users who will want to defragment their drives at one point or another, I believe it would be helpful to expand the documentation to:
take note of this major caveat (cannot defrag via the GUI they are used to) to warn users that there isn't anything wrong with their devices or Veracrypt settings, rather it's expected behavior
inform users that in order to defrag their drives they need to toggle two checkboxes: (Veracrypt settings -> performance/driver configuration -> under Driver Configuration tick "Enable extended disk control codes support" and "Allow Windows Disk Defragmenter to defragment non-system partition/drive
clarify whether Windows' "Automatic Maintenance" performs defragmentation on FDE disks - I'm not sure about the answer to this, but I would guess no?
clarify that in the case of FDE the drive needs to be mounted in order to start defragmenting
Is this something that makes sense to include in the documentation? If given the clear and clarification on what pages to edit and in what manner I would be open to opening a PR, but anyone can PR it I don't mind, I just hope to have this glaring issue to be clarified in the docs to prevent frustration for users.