I know general knowledge states not to defrag SSD's. But why? I analyzed mine with Ultimate Defrag 2008 and it was 45% fragged....

I know general knowledge states not to defrag SSD's. But why? I analyzed mine with Ultimate Defrag 2008 and it was 45% fragged....

SSD's are flash memory. Defragging is usless and will tear it down more quickly.Don't defrag SSD's.

I don't even think a SSD can be "fragged"

You defrag an HDD so every file occupies contiguous physical space on the HDD. Otherwise, when the file is fragmented, the file read will have to wait until the HDD repositions the read/write head at the start of the next fragment of the file. This involves waiting a looong time for the R/W head to move (seek time) as well as waiting for the disk platter to continue rotating to position itself under the R/W head so the file can continue to be read (latency).SSDs have no disk R/W heads, heck they don't even have any disks! SSDs are only (non-volatile) flash memory chips. the chips themselves are only good for about 10,000 write operations per memory page, so you need to execute the Trim command on your SSD to ensure level wear accross all pages (Win 7 automaticaly Trims SSDs, not sure about Vista and needs to be done manually with XP.)Cheers,- jahman.

Thanks.... yeah I suppose the technical word is fragmented. But fragged worked better :)

You defrag an HDD so every file occupies contiguous physical space on the HDD. Otherwise, when the file is fragmented, the file read will have to wait until the HDD repositions the read/write head at the start of the next fragment of the file. This involves waiting a looong time for the R/W head to move (seek time) as well as waiting for the disk platter to continue rotating to position itself under the R/W head so the file can continue to be read (latency).SSDs have no disk R/W heads, heck they don't even have any disks! SSDs are only (non-volatile) flash memory chips. the chips themselves are only good for about 10,000 write operations per memory page, so you need to execute the Trim command on your SSD to ensure level wear accross all pages (Win 7 automaticaly Trims SSDs, not sure about Vista and needs to be done manually with XP.)Cheers,- jahman.

Vista does NOT have a trim facility built into the OS. Some SSDs (i.e. Intel X-25M and 320) have a utility program that will run a trim pass.Actually, wear-levelling occurs with or without the use of trim on an SSD. Without trim, however, once the SSD's pages have all been written to once, writes will slow way down, because the SSD's firmware has to read every page, place the blocks to be written in the buffer, then write out the new page every time a write occurs. Trim allows the OS to flag empty pages for the firmware, so it can do the wear-levelling data moves in the background so that at write-time an empty page need only be written without first being read.With respect to disk "fragmentation" on an SSD, the data structures presented to the OS are the same as a physical HDD, so when a file is spread out in noncontiguous pieces across the SSD, it's correctly reported as fragmented by disk utilities. The key point, as jahman pointed out, is that fragmentation of data on an SSD is a big "so what" because the time to retrieve data from any page on the SSD is equal...there's no delay due to head and platter positioning requirements. And if you do run a defragger on an SSD, it does a massive number of writes as it moves data around and forces the wear-levelling firmware to go nuts behind the scenes, using up some of the flash NANDs' life--for nothing. With the firmware moving data around for wear-levelling, the data reported to the OS as "defragged" in contiguous blocks is actually spread out all over the SSD, because the SSD reports a virtual position for the data that is used to index into a page map used by the firmware to physically access the data.Short version: NEVER run a defrag utility on an SSD.

Thanks all for the explanations.