Defragging an SSD Drive

[dido41]

I use O&O defrag one my system with out an ssd drive. I am looking into buying the 128 GB soon and was wondering if I could use a defrag program such as O&O defrag on this drive to increase performance. I notice that you say disable defrag in all your tweaks. So is it a bad thing to defrag the ssd drives?

[razerza]

Defrag will kill your SSD. :/

Check the access times of all SSD's. It does not matter where your data is scattered!

[Schwanke78]

No need for it bro, defraging was for the days of the past with HD's and now it's the future with SSD!

[kAnton]

The guys from the OCZ forums say that you should defrag a SSD !

But they say that you should use "good" defrag-programms, not ones like the Windows-inbuilt =D
And no, it will definetely NOT kill your SSD ! Oh man, does a Benchmark kill a SSD ? NO !

If you do both very often your SSD might get slower, but you should defrag your SSD from time to time...


And i believe that the guys from the OCZ forums know much more (they also wrote nice tutorials for speed increasement) than the 3 guys above me....

[G.SKILL]

generally speaking, defrag programs would re-arrange the data in your SSD
and this action would increase the read/write times to your SSD, so it may decrease its life
by the way, the data in SSD is written into NAND flash, not traditional disk platter, so it is not so necessary to defrag your SSD from time to time


G.S

[boris.v]

I suggest to defrag your drive when it gets slow, but it won't

[razerza]

generally speaking, defrag programs would re-arrange the data in your SSD
and this action would increase the read/write times to your SSD, so it may decrease its life
by the way, the data in SSD is written into NAND flash, not traditional disk platter, so it is not so necessary to defrag your SSD from time to time


G.S

So glad this was posted...and watch how peeps will do it anyway.

@kAnton: For your reading pleasure...

Regarding do benchmarks degrade MLC and SLC drive performance...sure they do.

Regarding do benchmarks shorten MLC and SLC drive life...sure they do.

Why? because you are hammering the drive in a way it was not designed to run, no OS runs like a benchmark does. This is why we have threads explaining the more you bench a drive the more wear you are applying to the drive...even SLC drives slow down and take wear." - OCZ PR on 6-15-2009

Legit Reviews - OCZ Vertex EX Series 120GB SLC SSD Review - Final Thoughts and Conclusions

Feel free to ignore this too.

[techspec6]

Compared to the number of writes done daily by the OS and running a single benchmark, running defrag is nothing. Especially if you have the ability to TRIM the drive afterwards.

I'd recommend testing it for yourself. If it slows down your system, don't use it. If it helps, then use it. Can't argue with real world results afterall.

I wouldn't recommend using Defrag of any sort on a drive that doesn't have the ability to be TRIMmed.

Jason

[Ristogod]

The guys from the OCZ forums say that you should defrag a SSD !

Prove it....


Link?

[Tradesman]

Writes are the bane of SSDs, and are considered to shorten the life of a SSD, because the Flash chips are only rated for so many writes (might take a look at the reviews on the Egg about SSDs performance and stabilty starting to go after a few months:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231220

I've got a pair of them, and while performance never lived up to the advertising, and with spotty use, the performance has gradually decreased in spite of optimal tuning of drive, OS and programs.

To techspec6,
As for your OS writes (and other temp writes in particular, i.e. from your browsers, OS and other programs you can easily move them to another drive.

[Titus]

Writes are the bane of SSDs, and are considered to shorten the life of a SSD, because the Flash chips are only rated for so many writes (might take a look at the reviews on the Egg about SSDs performance and stabilty starting to go after a few months:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231220

I've got a pair of them, and while performance never lived up to the advertising, and with spotty use, the performance has gradually decreased in spite of optimal tuning of drive, OS and programs.

doesn't the wiper/TRIM tool help to regain lost performance?...also a 3rd party tool such as HDDErase is supposed to restore the drive to like new condition (sort of like writing zeroes to a mechanical hard drive)

[Tradesman]

It does clean up the flash's, but it is similar to a light bulb that can only be turned on so many times, the flashs can only be written to so many times. There are numerous articles available on the pros and cons, I've worked with a number of brands since they arrived and (here we go with opinion again, in this case mine) I found where systems have had their drives optimized, especially towards writes, maintain their initial speeds while those I've encountered where the OS , Browser, program temp files are kept on the SSD have indeed lost some speed (in some cases, quite a bit) even after being cleaned up and/or reformatted.

[sippy]

From what I've read on the net, the bane of SSDs is poor random write performance as free space gets fragmented, especially as the drive gets filled up. So free space consolidation and optimization to promote sequential writes is said to help. I have Diskeeper 2009 and it comes with something called Hyperfast that is said to do the free
space optimization thing, but since I don't have an SSD yet, I have not tried it out.
More info on what it does here
http://www.diskeeper.com/blog/post/2...lso-here!.aspx

[techspec6]

@tradesman

Yeah, I know. I'm running 3x 30GB SSDs, 2x 7200rpm's, a single 1TB and a 120GB SSD. Offloaded media and extra writes as well as several layers of backups and a new 120GB SSD for the testing.

Google for techspec6 alignment and take a look at my SSD alignment tool sometime.

Jason