Defrag SSD ever ?

digitaldreams

digitaldreams

digitaldreams

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Hi guys !

It is generally said that you shouldn't defrag SSD's. Yet I do mine every 6 months or so as it gets in a real mess with thousands of fragmented files in tens of thousands of fragments.

I understand that with early SSD's folk were worried about too many writes to particular cells yet isn't this less of a problem now ?. Why do it ?, you can't tell me that a badly fragmented SSD won't cause a drop in performance by a greater load on the controller as it struggles to piece files together for reads and split files for writes !. After years of experience of a large corporations magnetic hard drives (over 14,000 desktops & laptops) I also found that file corruption increased with fragmentation....

Thoughts ?

Regards
 
digitaldreams said:
you can't tell me that a badly fragmented SSD won't cause a drop in performance by a greater load on the controller as it struggles to piece files together for reads and split files for writes !.
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Actually I can tell you that. Where Windows thinks the file fragments are has no bearing on where they actually are, so defragmenting wouldn't work even if it was a good idea to begin with (which it's not). So all it does is cause unnecessary write-erase cycles.

digitaldreams said:
After years of experience of a large corporations magnetic hard drives (over 14,000 desktops & laptops) I also found that file corruption increased with fragmentation....

Thoughts ?

Regards
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SSDs are not HDDs and your experience in this case is irrelevant. SSDs do not "fragment" in the way that HDDs do - the whole problem with HDD fragmentation is that the physical head has to move, which causes delays (seek times). This isn't the case for SSDs: the data is all over the place all the time and the controller sorts everything out.

tl;dr - Don't defrag SSDs.
 
I bet it would take a bit for the SSD to recover after a defrag, because doesn't a SSD slow down if it has a lot of writes in a short space of time?
 
Phil2008 said:
I bet it would take a bit for the SSD to recover after a defrag, because doesn't a SSD slow down if it has a lot of writes in a short space of time?
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I find at certain percentages full they can slow down like mine I can notice a slowdown anything less than 10% free space left
 
SSDs deliberately spread stuff around, as that's both better for keeping wear even and better for read speeds as the high speeds come through using multiple channels. So don't defrag them :p

Having said that, it won't ruin performance, as it'll just rearrange the logical info, not where on the SSD the bits are stored as the OS has no control over this, unlike a traditional HDD. So you're just reshuffling your deck at the expense of wearing out your drive slightly faster and wasting your own time. If you actually want to 'refresh' your drive then back everything up, secure erase it and then restore it. This should make only a small difference too, depending on drive, but for some *cough 840 evo cough* it can make quite a large difference due to some controller issues.

Also, drive getting full does decrease performance, so clearing out your old junk files is probably a better way!
 
The answer is kinda no and yes

A traditional defrag no, however the later windows defrag tool detects ssds and when ran performs a ssd trim / garbage clean to get rid of stale files on the ssd and improve performance, while not a traditional defrag it is something can be ran from time to time
 
If the data is ment to be scattered over the drive, how come defrag tools dont show this? This is my SSD and as you can see its in one big clump........

Image2.jpg
 
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Phil2008 said:
If the data is ment to be scattered over the drive, how come defrag tools dont show this? This is my SSD and as you can see its in one big clump........

Image2.jpg
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That's where windows thinks the data is, block 1 window thinks is next to block 2 and so on, however what he is suggesting is block 1 is remapped by the drive so as not to be where you expect block one to be... Logically it's still block 1 to a zillion in sequence but those could be anywhere on the drive physically
 
I defrag mine with the traditional command line option occasionally.

As long as you don't do it excessively then there will be no problem, in regards to what it will do, then the *logical* order of the sectors will be contiguous, reducing the number of logical calls for sectors. With an SSD this will make very little difference, but it will still be slightly more efficient for the OS, if not the controller.

With regards to other comments, spinning HDDs also have the same issue with only the controller knowing where the sectors are on the drive, while it may look contiguous logically, physically it could be anywhere, this has been the case for a long time.

TL;DR, do it if you wish, your SSD won't suddenly explode or wear out, just don't do it excessively, like any read/write activity to a SSD.
 
stuie said:
The answer is kinda no and yes

A traditional defrag no, however the later windows defrag tool detects ssds and when ran performs a ssd trim / garbage clean to get rid of stale files on the ssd and improve performance, while not a traditional defrag it is something can be ran from time to time
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What is this tool called?
 
Ricimer said:
As long as you don't do it excessively then there will be no problem, in regards to what it will do, then the *logical* order of the sectors will be contiguous, reducing the number of logical calls for sectors. With an SSD this will make very little difference, but it will still be slightly more efficient for the OS, if not the controller.
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Whats the point though. Your killing the ssd just because you want it looking nice and tidy, yeah it probably looks tidier to you, but not to the SSD as your ripping the poor thing apart and prob cause it to run slower too from defragging........ Pointless if you ask me, leave well alone.
 
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Phil2008 said:
Whats the point though. Your killing the ssd just because you want it looking nice and tidy, yeah it probably looks tidier to you, but not to the SSD as your ripping the poor thing apart and prob cause it to run slower too from defragging........ Pointless if you ask me, leave well alone.
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Moving a few GB every now and then is not going to make much difference. And it will be very slightly faster as there are less file system calls to retrieve a contiguous file. It's not pointless, it reduces fragmentation, even if it is a low latency device.

Windows disables the *scheduled* defragmentation of SSDs because you don't want to do it all the time, not because it will do vast amounts of damage because you run it now and then.


Edit:

It's not likely to produce a measurable benefit, I'm just saying it's not going to do any harm if run irregularly. If people wanted to keep a flash drive forever, the only way to do so would be to write to it once and keep it plugged in (because flash contents degrades without power, so no use for offline storage).
 
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Why though? The SSD manages all that stuff on its own without you interfering,, Like when I do a secure erase and system restore with acronis, my reads and writes dip slightly after. But a few weeks later they are back up to full pelt again. so defragging for me, I really see no point in it and even when the reads/writes dip, you cant pick that up, only from benchies.
 
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