Defragging an SSD

Is there a point?

 

No.

It's not even that there is a negligible difference, there is no difference. Flash storage is not affected by fragmentation the way a conventional disk is.

 

there is just a minor point if you have a FILE that is fragmented. accessing a file that is split into thousands of fragments, while being actually tiny, will take a bit longer than when you defragment it.

there's an app at work that creates a log file which is more or less for each byte a new fragment. that hurts the file system, and the file.. after one day of usage, the file is around 5mb big, and split to 2000 fragments. this file slows down the start of that app independent on hdd or ssd. defragmenting that helps.

yes, it's a stupid app developer that should get punched for this log file, but well, one can't change it

 

After in depth research on this matter (all of 1 second) I have concluded that you do not need to defrag your ssd.

 

OK thanks everyone.

And Padme is hot.

 

Why not?

How long would it take? 30 seconds, 1 minute.

It would lessen the impact while working with fragmented files, increasing the life of your SSD.

They are not cheap. Why risk needing one sooner?

 

Actually, it would decrease the life of your SSD by writing a lot to it

And for file specific defrags - you could use defraggler from the same company that makes CCleaner.

 

http://www.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/CS-029623.htm#5

Please do not defrag your SSD. Hard drives are primarily bottlenecked by the physical movement of the head. SSDs are nowhere near bottlenecked by the access time of individual chip as much as the controller implementation and algorithm. The writes that occur during defragmentation will actually worsen the lifespan of an SSD drive(albeit, a little).

A "defrag" for SSD is called TRIM. Or if you don't have one, SECURE ERASE.

 

Yeah you must not understand what a defrag does. It would take more than a minute for sure, and it would do thousands of deletes/writes on the disk.
And no it would not lessen the impact when working with fragmented files, don't you guys get how an SSD works? If you have 2 million electronic cells it's not like a magnetic disk where it physically has to go from one sector to another, creating latency issues when it has to jump the read head around. It doesn't matter if you have 200 contiguous blocks for 200 blocks spread far apart from each other on the disk, the time it takes an SSD to go from reading block 1 and block 2 million and back is the same amount of time as it takes an SSD to read block 1 and block 2 and back.

EDIT: Beat by the users above, but still true.

 

Trim isn't a defrag - and "secure erase" isn't either.
Secure Erase on a HDD just overwrites the same space several times... on a SSD that would be extra wear.
And TRIM is connected to the actual deletion of files - I think it removes the actual content - read up on it, but its NOT the same as a defragmentation.

 

TRIM and Secure Erase does essentially the same thing. And both are SSD's way of "Defrag". It's not "Defragmentation" like HDDs are, but how will people understand otherwise?

 

By properly explaining it, not by muddying the water.
And Secure Erase from a HDD - where it exists as overwriting the same spot x times will only increase wear.

 

I believe he was stating the equivalent of a defrag - from what I've read derfagging on SSD's is as pointless exercise with no benefits and can possibly damage or reduce life of SSD's.

Defrag makes fragmented files more whole to make reading them more efficient for typical HDD's, but SSDs don't need to worry about fragments since there's no spinning to get data. Instead SSDs need to worry about wasted space being taken up by 'junk' files - where on a HDD a junk file might take only 512bytes, on a SSD I think each file takes a minimum of 128kbytes meaning spare space is taken up a lot faster - and SSD speeds can degrade rapidly as the spare capacity shrinks - which is what TRIM combats by removing these 'junk' files. So in that sense, Defrag for HDDs is a similar means for the same end with respect to TRIM for SSDs

 

I agree, while it was not a direct comparison it served the purpose of explaining it in a more simple way, both clean up their counterpart so they can perform the best, this being more crucial for SSDs.