Drive Health and the SSD truth (never defrag an SSD)

Drive Health tells you the truth most "optimizers" get wrong. It reports your drives' real media type, capacity, TRIM status and the SMART data they actually expose — and it does the correct maintenance for each: ReTrim for SSDs, defragment only for confirmed spinning HDDs. It will never defragment flash, never overwrite-erase it, and never invent a fake "health %". This honesty is the whole point of the feature.

Why an SSD must never be defragmented

Defragmentation rearranges files into contiguous blocks so a mechanical read head doesn't have to seek across a spinning platter. An SSD has no head and no seek penalty — fragmentation simply doesn't slow it down. "Defragging" an SSD does nothing useful and does burn through a slice of the drive's finite write endurance for zero benefit. The real maintenance for flash is TRIM: telling the drive which blocks are now free so it can manage wear and keep writes fast. BRUTAL exposes that as ReTrim, never defrag.

The media-type gate (how it can't get this wrong)

Behind the scenes, each drive is classified from Windows' own storage data: MSFT_PhysicalDisk for media type and bus, MSFT_Partition to map a drive letter to its physical disk. BRUTAL will only defragment a drive that is provably an internal spinning HDD — confirmed HDD media, on an internal bus (SATA/ATA/SAS/SCSI), not removable, not a RAID or Storage Spaces virtual volume, with a real disk mapping. Anything ambiguous — USB enclosures, NVMe, persistent memory, unknown media — fails safe to do not defrag. Even the underlying optimize routine refuses a defrag request on non-HDD media, as defense in depth beyond the disabled button.

What the health report shows

• Media & bus — NVMe SSD, SSD, HDD (with RPM if reported), persistent memory, or removable.
• Capacity — size and free space per volume.
• TRIM status — whether TRIM is enabled system-wide (read from fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify), shown on flash drives.
• SMART / reliability — temperature, SSD wear %, power-on hours, read/write error totals, start/stop cycles. These come from Get-StorageReliabilityCounter and only the fields your drive actually reports are shown. Many consumer drives expose only a subset; BRUTAL displays what's there and never synthesizes a number.
• Fragmentation (HDD) — a read-only analysis with a percentage and a plain recommendation.

How to check and maintain a drive

1. Open Drive Health from the sidebar. Scanning, health reporting and fragmentation analysis are all free.
2. Read each drive's card: media type, TRIM state and any SMART values it reports.
3. On an HDD, run Analyze to see fragmentation (read-only — it changes nothing).
4. Click the action button to maintain the drive: ReTrim on an SSD (runs without a prompt; it's quick and harmless) or Defragment on a confirmed HDD (you'll get an OK/Cancel confirm because it can run long).

The myths we refuse to ship

The page includes a standing "SSD Health & Truth" panel listing the bad advice common optimizers still push — and that BRUTAL will not do:

• Defragmenting an SSD (pointless, wears the drive).
• Disabling SysMain/Prefetch as "SSD care" (it isn't).
• Deleting the pagefile or hibernation file to "save the SSD".
• Turning off indexing as endurance protection.
• Multi-pass "secure erase" overwrites on flash (the wrong tool for SSDs).

Common issues / troubleshooting

• The Defragment button is greyed out — correct: the drive isn't a proven internal HDD (it's an SSD, NVMe, USB, RAID or Storage Space), so defrag is intentionally blocked.
• No SMART values appear — your drive doesn't report those counters, or they're behind a USB bridge. BRUTAL shows only what the drive exposes rather than guessing.
• TRIM shows off — that's worth fixing in Windows; BRUTAL surfaces the status so you know.
• External SSD shows as "Removable" — it's treated as external and never defragged, which is the safe choice.

To actually reclaim space rather than maintain the drive's mechanics, see the Disk Cleaner and Disk Analyzer.