Should I defragment my (18% fragmented) SSD?

[Elliot B.]

Disk Defragmenter is reporting my 60GB SSD is 18% fragmented.

I have never defragmented the SSD as the general consensus seems to be that it's unnecessary on SSDs and if anything, it shortens the life of them.

Should I defragment it?

[Panda X]

No.

[Ulpian]

IMPORTANT NOTE: Solid State Drives DO NOT require defragmentation. It may decrease the lifespan of the drive.

[articuno1au]

No.

Next time you format you should do a proper "clean" of the drive (empty all the cells (I have no idea what the correct term for it is D:))

OCZ offer a tool to clear the memory state when you format. Well worth it imo :)

[Japlabot]

"the general consensus seems to be that it's unnecessary on SSDs and if anything, it shortens the life of them."

"Should I defragment it?"

Yes. Go ahead.

[roguekiller23231]

i've been wondering if defraging is actually needed on an SSD, and there are 2 things that i always come accross.

1, the whole thing that SSD don't have a disc so arn't effected by fragmented files.

2, defragging the drive wares it out and lowers the life expectancy of the drive.

imo both are true and it's really not worth doing, no matter how annoying it is to see that the drive is fragmented, it will keep happening as you add and remove files, and it's only going to lower the life of the drive rather than speed things up.

[articuno1au]

The reason fragmented files are bad on spinning platter disks is that the file ends up all over the disk, which means that the disk head has to move all over the joint to read the information. This movement takes time, not to mention you then need to wait for the right part of the disk to spin under the head..

With a solid state disk, there are 0 moving parts, so file location is COMPLETELY irrelephant (like an elephant).

The clearest demonstration of this is in response time (latency for those of you who use such terms). Average hard disk is like 30ms, average SSD is less then 1ms (0.01 I believe, but am not willing to stand by..)

[ManMountain]

"Drive C is a flash-based solid state drive. Due to the physical build of SSDs, their performance cannot be improved by defragmentation.

An SSD's flash memory is bound to a physical maximum of write access times. A defragmentation can influence the wear levelling algorithms of the SSD and shorten the life span of the drive" - O&O Defrag.

My SSD is 20% fragmented but it's as quick as the day I first installed it.

[neoraptor]

I want to just add - keep on analyzing them for fragmentation!

Have you ever wonder why windows7 disables the scheduled defrag for ssd drives

[Seizure1990]

Next time you format you should do a proper "clean" of the drive (empty all the cells (I have no idea what the correct term for it is D:))

It's TRIM. :)

[yowanvista]

SSDs should never be defragmented.

[yxz]

:cool:

[articuno1au]

It's TRIM. :)

No it's not..

Trim is an operation performed on a disk with the intent of clearing out unused spaces to accelerate later writes (by removing the delete cycle before the write). This operation is performed while the disk is in use and and filled with data.

Although the same task is performed at a most simplistic of assessments; It is not the same thing..

[primexx]

No it's not..

Trim is an operation performed on a disk with the intent of clearing out unused spaces to accelerate later writes (by removing the delete cycle before the write). This operation is performed while the disk is in use and and filled with data.

Although the same task is performed at a most simplistic of assessments; It is not the same thing..

i'm thinking it's just a effort-saving utility that combines a secure erase with TRIM. I certainly haven't heard of any special blanking tool for my drive (Intel).

[philcruicks]

no.

[articuno1au]

i'm thinking it's just a effort-saving utility that combines a secure erase with TRIM. I certainly haven't heard of any special blanking tool for my drive (Intel).

Close enough.

OCZ just love their users ;)

[Lexcyn]

i'm thinking it's just a effort-saving utility that combines a secure erase with TRIM. I certainly haven't heard of any special blanking tool for my drive (Intel).

There is a wipe tool in the Intel SSD toolbox.

[seta-san]

absolutely not. you defragment magnetic disks because they excel at sequential reads and suck at random read/writes. SSDs aren't mechanically limited and suffer no performance issues for fragmented files and defragmenting it will only cause damage to your drive.

[Gaffney]

Put your computer on sleep mode few the next few nights and your SSD will get a speed boost because of TRIM

[madd-hatter]

My defrag tool won't even allow me to attempt to defrag my SSD.

[daniel_rh]

According that what I've read, it's not neccesary

[Pam14160]

Simply put. . .no. :)

[neufuse Veteran]

sequential read is still a good deal faster then random read on all the SSD's I've worked with so far... seems like it shouldn't be that way but all the benchmarks have been that way

I'm putting this mainly on the drives chipset being crap still in a bunch of cases

[myxomatosis]

My SSD (C:\ 2 x Intel X25-M). Beat that :p

The only factor affecting the performance right now is the fact that the SSDs cannot be trimmed because Intel RST drivers (drivers for the ICH controller) can't pass the "trim" command on a RAID array. (Coming in RST 11.5 in theory). But the fact that the disks are fragmented (well the data on the disks to me more precise) doesn't affect significantly the performance. Access time is still lightning fast

Put your computer on sleep mode few the next few nights and your SSD will get a speed boost because of TRIM

What you're describing is called garbage collecting I think, not trim. Not every SSD disks support garbage collecting. OCZs do, maybe Corsair too. Intel SSDs don't. My old Vertex (1st gen) do and it is pretty efficient.

[primexx]

There is a wipe tool in the Intel SSD toolbox.

that's secure erase. it doesn't blank out the cells, just throws away the encryption key and generates a new one. you'd still need to TRIM it (the optimizer tool) to blank the cells out.