SSDs

thereddaikon · 08-23-17, 06:21 PM

The short answer is no don't defrag an SSD.

The long answer is more complicated but I won't drag on too much. There's plenty of great write-up on the web that explain SSD operation better than I can. I recommend checking out Anandtech they did some great articles on the topic when they first hit the market 10 years ago.

So SSDs can and do fragment, all storage will with use. However a conventional defragmentation process is bad for the life of the drive because the memory blocks in flash have a finite number of read/write passes that can be made. This is also technically true of disk drives but the number is less strict and factors in other variables such the workloads the drive sees and environmental concerns like heat. A cool and easy used hard drive is a happy drive. I have hard drives pushing 30 that still work. With flash memory it comes down to the actual number of read/writes. Think of it like the difference between a gas powered car and an electric one. A gas car can run over a million miles if it's well cared for and never driven hard. But an electric car with batteries that have had the charge cycles for a million miles will have flat batteries. Li-ion batteries lose capacity as a function of charge cycles just like an SSD looses capacity as a function of write cycles.

This is where TRIM comes in. Think of it like the SSDs flavor of defrag. It's not that simple but for our purposes I'm making it that simple. Windows 7, still the most popular version does not have inbuilt support for TRIM. It predates widespread SSD adoption. Windows 8 and up do. So if you are going to use an SSD I recommend using Windows 10. Not only does it support TRIM but it also supports DX12 and this is a forum about computer games so I'll assume that's an important quality. As for when and how to run. Don't. It's automatic and takes care of itself. All you have to do is not run that defrag and screw it up. I was an early adopter of SSDs and things have gotten a lot better as time has gone on. The earliest drives were unreliable and with Windows 7 couldn't TRIM. I was lucky to get a year out of the things. Now they are as near as reliable to disk drives as make no difference for a PC. We've even started to use them in servers lately. The performance gains for a high availability SQL database are not to be dismissed.

08-23-17, 06:21 PM	#4
thereddaikon Watch Join Date: Jul 2017 Posts: 22 Downloads: 9 Uploads: 0	The short answer is no don't defrag an SSD. The long answer is more complicated but I won't drag on too much. There's plenty of great write-up on the web that explain SSD operation better than I can. I recommend checking out Anandtech they did some great articles on the topic when they first hit the market 10 years ago. So SSDs can and do fragment, all storage will with use. However a conventional defragmentation process is bad for the life of the drive because the memory blocks in flash have a finite number of read/write passes that can be made. This is also technically true of disk drives but the number is less strict and factors in other variables such the workloads the drive sees and environmental concerns like heat. A cool and easy used hard drive is a happy drive. I have hard drives pushing 30 that still work. With flash memory it comes down to the actual number of read/writes. Think of it like the difference between a gas powered car and an electric one. A gas car can run over a million miles if it's well cared for and never driven hard. But an electric car with batteries that have had the charge cycles for a million miles will have flat batteries. Li-ion batteries lose capacity as a function of charge cycles just like an SSD looses capacity as a function of write cycles. This is where TRIM comes in. Think of it like the SSDs flavor of defrag. It's not that simple but for our purposes I'm making it that simple. Windows 7, still the most popular version does not have inbuilt support for TRIM. It predates widespread SSD adoption. Windows 8 and up do. So if you are going to use an SSD I recommend using Windows 10. Not only does it support TRIM but it also supports DX12 and this is a forum about computer games so I'll assume that's an important quality. As for when and how to run. Don't. It's automatic and takes care of itself. All you have to do is not run that defrag and screw it up. I was an early adopter of SSDs and things have gotten a lot better as time has gone on. The earliest drives were unreliable and with Windows 7 couldn't TRIM. I was lucky to get a year out of the things. Now they are as near as reliable to disk drives as make no difference for a PC. We've even started to use them in servers lately. The performance gains for a high availability SQL database are not to be dismissed.