Yeah, optimize and defragging are two different things - sort of. Optimize is a "general" term for various maintenance tasks on drives. Different types of drives require different maintenance tasks. Hard drives require defragging and SSDs require TRIM.
Note in Windows, the feature is not even called Windows Defrag anymore. It is called Optimize Disk.
As noted, Windows knows the difference between a HD and SSD and will use the appropriate optimizing task for each. You can tell Windows to defrag a SSD but it will not do it. Defragging improves performance and decreases wear and tear on the hard drive and TRIM provides "wear leveling" - a feature to ensure even use across the SSD - greatly extending the lifespan of the whole SSD.
Also as noted, the reason you don't defrag a SSD is because of how data is stored on and retrieved from a SSD. A hard drive is like a drawer in a file cabinet with the pages (file segments) of the report (file) you need scattered (fragmented) in no particular order from front to back. To retrieve all the pages in the right order, you have to stand in front of the file cabinet and rifle through the drawer sequentially, going front to back and back to front (back and forth across the disk platters), picking up the pages in the correct order. This takes a lot of time - especially if page 1 is in the front and page 2 in the back then page 3 near the front again, and so on. And remember, this is a mechanical arm (read: slow) moving back and forth.
For a SSD, think of a
mail sorting box. You simply stand in front of the box and directly grab each page of the report. It takes the same amount of time and effort to grab every page, regardless where it is located. It does not matter if the pages are next to each other and in the correct order (not fragmented) or if the pages are scattered all over the place (heavily fragmented). It takes the exact same amount of time to gather up the whole file in the correct order. And this is not a mechanical arm moving a magnetic Read/Write head back and forth across spinning platters. It is done totally through intelligent electronics (read:
very fast).
As for the "Recovery" partition, yeah it is not really a bug saying it needs optimization, but it clearly is not accurately reflecting the proper need. A Recovery partition is never used to store new data. The recovery information is put there once during Windows installation [hopefully] never touched again. So there is no need to "optimize" the partition. But Windows does not know the difference between a Recovery partition and any other partition so it puts a clock timer on Recovery partitions too. Bottom line, you can just ignore it.
