Windows Server Treating SSD RAID Array Like HDD

skimmilk5 · November 4

I have a HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen 9 running the B160i controller in RAID mode. On that controller, I have four physical drives across two logical disks: two SanDisk CloudSpeed Eco Gen I 480GB SSDs (that form C: drive) and two Western Digital Black HDDs (that form D: drive). The system is running Windows Server 2022 Standard with all of the HPE ProLiant tools installed (Windows Server was installed using Intelligent Provisioning).

In the defragment/optimize drives tool, Windows sees the SSD array as a hard disk drive, so it tries to defragment it, rather than TRIM it. Obviously, SSDs should not be defragmented, but the question is why Windows sees the array as a hard disk drive, rather than a solid state drive. Is there a way to force Windows to treat this disk like a TRIMable SSD, rather than as a defragmentable hard disk drive?

I have already tried using

winsat formal

to try and get Windows Server to detect the drive type, but if it's hard-coded into the OS, that obviously won't work.

Because the disk is seen as a HDD, I disabled the scheduled automatic defragmentation. The current workaround is to just manually run the defragment operation on the HDD array whenever it's needed and make sure that the SSD array is not defragmented.

(It's irrelevant, but before you ask: the system is a HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen 9 with two Intel Xeon E5-2637 v4 processors, 32GB of RDIMM DDR4 at 2133 MT/s. The system also has the onboard 331i 1GbE NIC on the built-in LOM slot, HPE 10Gb 560FLR-SFP+ NIC (with the Intel 82599 controller) in the mezzanine LOM slot and a Nvidia Tesla P4 GPGPU in slot 0 (connected to processor 0). The storage controller, as mentioned, is the HPE Dynamic Smart Array B160i controller in RAID mode. No drives are encrypted by the controller, and all drives are configured. The two SSDs are on port 1I box 1 bay 1 and bay 2, and the two HDDs are on port 1I box 1 bay 3 and bay 4. Box 2 is empty and physically has no drives.)

brwainer · November 4

This comes down to the virtual disk that the RAID card is presenting to Windows. Look in the RAID card config for whether there is a drive type option. Make sure you have backups that you have tested and confirm working before making changes.

skimmilk5 · November 4

ProLiant Smart Array controllers don't have that support, unfortunately.

skimmilk5 · November 5

There doesn't seem to be a way to tell Windows that the array isn't a SSD array. Which drives are not HDD (eMMC, SSD, etc.) seems to be a list supplied by Microsoft by device ID that can't be updated manually (or in any case, a way that wouldn't get wiped out by a Windows Update).

My workaround will seem to have to work. Windows's GUI defragmentation tool doesn't support only scheduling one disk to defragment, so I wrote a little PowerShell script using the

Optimize-Volume

cmdlet. I have it scheduled to run on only the D: drive (the HDD array) weekly using the Task Scheduler. I'm just going to let the SSD's controller do the garbage collection on its own.