March 5, 201412 yr My search of the forum seems to indicate that it is standard practice not to defrag an SSD. However most of those posts are a year or more old. Is "not to defrag" still the current thinking? Dan George (woodhick)Check out Greenbrier Aero Club, the VA for and about the GA pilot.
March 5, 201412 yr To my knowledge, an SSD cannot get fragmented. Thus you will never have to defrag it. There's no performance gain at all. I even understand a defragmentation process can degrade an SSD. Regards, Frank van der Werff
March 5, 201412 yr No mechanical components in SSDs (which would imply defragmentation) but limited cycle life, Dan. So, don't defrag them. What happened to AVSIM
March 5, 201412 yr Do NOT defragment an SSD ever... you must use TRIM. There are utilities provided by the drive manufacturers if you wish to do this manually, but Windows 7 and 8 have TRIM capabilities, as do disk management software suites such as O&O... My guess, from what I have read on SSDs and fragmentation, is that SSDs fragment as well. However, the massive increase in seek times and degrading of performance for mechanical drives requires defragmentation to improve their performance. This is not the issue with SSDs... TRIM is the way to go... A Andrew Entwistle
March 5, 201412 yr My understanding is, the OS will move things around the SSD on its own to maximize SSD life. If this is the case, defragging is moot. Hook Larry Hookins Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of EarthAnd danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
March 5, 201412 yr Just to drive home the point a little further... NEVER NEVER NEVER. Although file fragmentation occurs on all drive types, it is a problem with "traditional" hard drives because of the physical method used to move the read/write heads over the disk. It ends up taking more time for the drive to find and read files if they're scattered about the hard drive like confetti. On the other hand, SSD's have no moving parts, so there's absolutely no negative impact of file fragmentation on those drives. Files are found and read instantly because there is no physical motion needed to get the data. In fact, as others have noted, attempting to defrag your SSD will only cause it to undergo unnecessary read and write cycles to the various regions of its memory, thus having a potential impact on the longevity of the drive itself. (*One or two defragmenting cycles won't cause earth shattering issues, but if you had it scheduled for an automatic daily defrag, it very well could impact the lifespan.) Never ever ever.
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