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I have an SSD mounted in an external enclosure and it was installed as a Windows to Go workstation. The external enclosure has a VL716 chipset and the connection to the PC is done via an USB Type-C cable from the enclosure to USB 3.0 type A.

Windows however shows the following picture (disregard the Iomega drive, that has an HDD inside):

The SSD is incorrectly identified (C and D), the Iomega drive is an external HDD.

So it's not recognizing the drive as an SSD, the correct picture would be like this:

The SSD is correctly identified (C and D), Iomega is an external HDD.

That was when the SSD was mounted directly to a SATA port of the machine. Wondering if it had something to do with the enclosure I changed it to another USB 3.0 one that uses a different chipset, this time is a JMicron one; but to no avail.

Interestingly, TRIM commands do make it to the disk with both enclosures when issued via PowerShell for example:

Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter D -ReTrim -Verbose

But since Windows doesn't identify it as an SSD I fear it'll try to defragment the drive instead of just issuing a TRIM. I could disable the weekly or daily optimization of Windows and set up an scheduled task to issue TRIM manually but I would rather know what Windows does or how it recognizes SSDs, maybe there's a bug that needs to be reported or I'm missing a step but the Windows to Go installation was performed officially (i.e. not using third party tools) and directly into the SSD, it wasn't cloned.

I apologize for the long read, but I wanted to give you as much details as possible, and if something is missing just let me know to amend the question.

Dave M
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James Russell
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    You can disable defragging in task scheduler for any drive. – Moab Jul 01 '18 at 11:32
  • use [winsat](https://superuser.com/a/887222/174557) to calculate the Perf index – magicandre1981 Jul 01 '18 at 17:56
  • @Moab I know, for now I've disabled optimization for all drives using the scheduling options in the UI I posted directly, since it's a Windows to Go workspace I wouldn't need to defrag or optimize other drives but this one. – James Russell Jul 01 '18 at 20:00
  • @magicandre1981 I tried running the full winsat set but it doesn't seem to make Windows aware that the drive it's installed on is an SSD despite the insanely high IO rate compared to a mechanical disk. – James Russell Jul 01 '18 at 20:04
  • is write caching enabled for the external drive in device manager? – magicandre1981 Jul 01 '18 at 20:57
  • @magicandre1981 It is, I was almost certain but I just checked just in case. Everything seems to be fine except Windows is adamant this is a mechanical hard drive. I wonder if this happens too in those already packaged USB SSDs like the Samsung T3 for example. – James Russell Jul 02 '18 at 13:27
  • hm, I just tested it with a SSD and I see the same under 8.1. so seams to be an issue with the enclosures. Submit it in feedback hub. – magicandre1981 Jul 09 '18 at 15:45

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