Blue screen when trying to optimize drive

Found out that while I was away my PC had crashed ("Your PC ran into a problem...") and got the helpful tip to look for REGISTRY_ERROR.

Given that I have an SSD drive, I thought of running the optimize drive program that comes with Windows 10, but alas, got the crash again.

Furthermore, if I try to run defrag C: /A (to analyze the drive) I get the same crash.

The system seems to be running normally, except that if I leave the system unattended for some time it will eventually crash (I guess it is trying to perform a scheduled optimization, but that's only a hunch.)

Any hints on what to try next?

Edit:

The problem is still happening. Looking at Problem Details under the Reliability Monitor applet (under Security and Maintenance) I see the following item:

Problem: Windows stopped working

Description: The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x00000051 (0x0000000000000001, 0xffffc0016b2e9000, 0x00000000a0ed56b3, 0x00000000000002d2). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\MEMORY.DMP. Report Id: 100115-14031-01.

Never ever defrag an SSD with Windows. It hurts them, especially the 3500MB/s NVMe variety, It is way too much of burst after burst heating the thing up too much. They are designed to fill the RAM and Netflix and chill down to temperature realms that matter exists in a solid state (pardon the pun). Again Samsung Magician does not defrag; it basically removes files from the registry so they are ready to be overwritten.

File fragmentation has no effect on an SSD at all ever no matter what your problem is. If somebody tells you to defrag your SSD ask someone else and never ask that person again. Defragmenting an SSD is doing one thing and one thing only, creating a lot of wear and tear on a not cheap device.

Each SSD should have a number on the box followed by TBW. It's not normally a big number. For the Samsung 970 EVO plus drives which are still among the top performers, it is 150tbw per 250GB of storage, so even the 2TB has a lifespan of 1200tbw. I don't think reads count, but writes most certainly do. If your SSD is not fast enough, it's probably a different thing and you are blaming the SSD, but if you do want better performance from even an NVMe drive, I use a program called ramcache and my 3,500 read and 3,300 write is now around 10,000 for read and write up to a file size of 12-15GB because the 256MB cache which is fast already has its fair share of 8GB of RAM dedicated to being an extra layer on top of each drive's cache, I'm only using 2x16GB cards, but when I do add another 2 to the empty slots, I don't plan to use more for ramcache, even the old 750GB Toshiba 5400rpm from my laptop is able to be scary fast in a Samsung Magician benchmark test.

The other avenue for accelerated storage is more for speeding up your slower drives to your fastest SSD or even NVMe speeds is StoreMi by AMD which they recently discontinued to be replaced later in the year or Enmotus has a newer version called fuzedrive, which basically takes a section of your fast drive and your slower drive and creates a virtual C drive and migrates the most used files to the fast drive, useful if you want to add speed via an SSD, but don't want to migrate your boot manager and everything. It only uses 256GB of the SSD to do it too so even a 4TB boot drive can get SSD performance and keep its storage size while being more or less plug in SSD to a fast enough access and install fuzedrive, click go, it does the rest, benchmarks and continues to learn as you use your drives. SSD speed, SATA storage, and a 256GB purchase does the job. As far as diagnosing what's really going on, visit https://www.userbenchmark.com/. If that can't tell you, you might really have a problem and quite likely be rethinking your choice of friends too.