SSD+Defrag

[Lyonheart]

i ran a system check on my PC and one of the things it listed was that my HD ( i use a 250gb SSD ) was 39% fragmented. I thought they did not fragment.. or is it you should not defragment them?

[MiRai]

To Windows, an SSD will almost always look like it's fragmented, but that doesn't mean anything.

Do you know anyone who has a desk full of stuff piled up to the ceiling? While their desk might look like a complete mess to you (Windows), they (the SSD) know exactly where everything is and will give you whatever information you ask for in the blink of an eye.

[Lyonheart]

To Windows, an SSD will almost always look like it's fragmented, but that doesn't mean anything.

Do you know anyone who has a desk full of stuff piled up to the ceiling? While their desk might look like a complete mess to you (Windows), they (the SSD) know exactly where everything is and will give you whatever information you ask for in the blink of an eye.

Thanks! So this auto pc clean up program my virus plan has..it will not let me uncheck the defrag portion..so skip it all together?

[EaTCarbS]

Thanks! So this auto pc clean up program my virus plan has..it will not let me uncheck the defrag portion..so skip it all together?

If that program is going to try and defrag an SSD, then it is a terrible program.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Just to provide a bit of history for future readers, disk fragmentation is *NORMAL* behavior. For normal disk drives, there is a magnetic head that has to move (seek) every time it wants to read a different bit of information. Because it's mechanical, the farther it has to move, the longer it takes and thus the slower your system is while it is trying to find the information. This is called "seek time" and is why you see something like 5-11ms seek time rating for HDDs. SSDs work like RAM in that there is no moving magnetic head -- it's all direct access by address, so it absolutely does NOT matter where on the SSD the bits are located -- it is always instant when finding the the data. So, seek time for SSDs is in the sub-ms range meaning there is effectively zero cost/time to find data in the SSD's memory chips. So, fragmentation is largely irrelevant for SSDs.

The reason defragmentation is BAD for SSDs is that each "cell" or part of the SSD's memory chips where the data is written can only be written to or read from a certain, limited number of times. So, every time something rewrites the data, you are losing a cycle from the lifetime of that cell. Because you gain nothing (see above) from rearranging the data on the SSD, this rewriting of data is simply lost hours from the lifetime of the drive.

For more info on the differences and terminology, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Comparison_of_SSD_with_hard_disk_drive s

[MiRai]

Windows (Vista, 7, 8) has its own automatic scheduler for defragging drives and you shouldn't need some external program to do it for you. If you own an SSD you should double-check that the drive isn't being defragged by Windows to begin with, especially if it isn't the system drive. I believe any new disks that get added to your system after Windows is installed automatically get added to the automatic defrag scheduler.

And to add to Ugh's post - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling - which is actually already mentioned in his link.

[Alge]

Do you know anyone who has a desk full of stuff piled up to the ceiling? While their desk might look like a complete mess to you (Windows), they (the SSD) know exactly where everything is and will give you whatever information you ask for in the blink of an eye.

TIL I am an SSD.

[Khatovar]

Windows (Vista, 7, 8) has its own automatic scheduler for defragging drives and you shouldn't need some external program to do it for you. If you own an SSD you should double-check that the drive isn't being defragged by Windows to begin with, especially if it isn't the system drive. I believe any new disks that get added to your system after Windows is installed automatically get added to the automatic defrag scheduler.

And to add to Ugh's post - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling - which is actually already mentioned in his link.

This was the case a few months ago when I added a pair of SSDs to my box. I had to go into the disk defragmenter and turn off scheduling.