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Do you defragment SSD hard-drives? |
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#1 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: May 2014
Posts: 4,465
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Do you defragment SSD hard-drives?
Do SSD hard-drives need to be defragmented?
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#2 |
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Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Hertfordshire
Posts: 2,935
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No. In fact, it should be avoided.
The performance of an SSD is not inhibited by the seek time associated with a mechanical hard drive having to move the heads around to retrieve different parts of a fragmented file. The technology in SSDs degrade a tiny amount with every write operation until eventually they stop holding information. Modern SSDs will go on for many years in normal operation but defragmenting one will accelerate the natural wear on the memory cells without delivering any benefit. |
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#3 |
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Reading
Posts: 27,901
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This
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRea...ntYourSSD.aspx suggests that under certain circumstances Windows does in fact automatically defrag SSDs. Whether that means you should initiate a defrag manually or not is a whole other topic! If you Google "defrag SSDs" most hits seem to suggest you shouldn't with only a few suggesting it is OK. |
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#4 |
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Join Date: Dec 2011
Posts: 1,039
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No, definitely not. SSDs work very differently from the mechanical drives. They have their own optimisation scheme of various elements. One of those would be defragmentation, but different from that on a mechanical hard drive. Windows knows the difference and will use the appropriate methods.
You set it and forget it. |
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#5 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Apr 2011
Posts: 10,733
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The words you are looking for are No, NO and NOOOOOO!!!
There is no point defraging a SSD and all it would do would be to lessen its life span. It makes no difference in time on an SSD to reference any part of the drive unlike a standard spinny thing where you have to wait for the head to be over the point you want. |
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#6 |
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Join Date: Mar 2003
Posts: 11,476
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This was more of an issue (as far as longevity) with the early SSDs. The number of writes that can be performed before the drive craps out has increased massively between those early models and current ones.
But yes, since there's no real benefit to defragging .... why would you do it. |
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#7 |
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Join Date: Aug 2013
Posts: 27
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What is the difference between optimisation and defragmentation? If any, in relation to SSD's.
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#8 |
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Join Date: Apr 2011
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Quote:
What is the difference between optimisation and defragmentation? If any, in relation to SSD's.
For most people the drive will be able to saturate the sata channel with ease on reads thus making perhaps changes not worth their while. |
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#9 |
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Storbritannia
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Quote:
This was more of an issue (as far as longevity) with the early SSDs. The number of writes that can be performed before the drive craps out has increased massively between those early models and current ones.
But yes, since there's no real benefit to defragging .... why would you do it. |
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#10 |
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Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Hertfordshire
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Quote:
...particularly if an effcient file system and data apportionment process is being used, i.e. not a Microsoft operating system.
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#11 |
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Storbritannia
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Quote:
Nonsense. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with NTFS or Windows' management of storage at all.
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#12 |
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Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Newbury
Posts: 6,749
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Quote:
However, if that were wholly true then defragmentation software would not be needed in the first place for Microsoft operating systems. That is not an issue for more efficient Unix-like operating systems such as BSD, Linux, macOS (formerly OS X), etc.
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#13 |
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Join Date: Apr 2011
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Quote:
I tend to agree. If an efficient algorithm were used, why would files still become fragmented even with large amounts of contiguous free space?
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#14 |
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Join Date: Apr 2006
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Quote:
However, if that were wholly true then defragmentation software would not be needed in the first place for Microsoft operating systems. That is not an issue for more efficient Unix-like operating systems such as BSD, Linux, macOS (formerly OS X), etc.
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#15 |
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Join Date: Mar 2011
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Quote:
However, if that were wholly true then defragmentation software would not be needed in the first place for Microsoft operating systems. That is not an issue for more efficient Unix-like operating systems such as BSD, Linux, macOS (formerly OS X), etc.
MacOS for example does defragmentation as part of it's normal background processes. When a file > 20 MB is opened it is checked automatically for fragmentation and queued to be relocated to a single contiguous disk region if required. Quote:
I tend to agree. If an efficient algorithm were used, why would files still become fragmented even with large amounts of contiguous free space?
If the file size is known then NTFS won't split up a file on write if there is a suitable contiguous area. |
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