Defrag SSD

F

Freerunner

Member
Not sure if this post is on the right area, but I was reading in another thread that one should not defrag an SSD. I was wondering why and what happens if you do (I have an SSD and used Defraggler only once).
 
Please explain why you feel that defragging would be applicable to ssd.

It's not a trap and/or I'm not trying to be mean. I was curious about your current understanding of hard drives so we can discuss.
 
I've always used defrag as a regular maintenance (maybe 2 or 3 times a year), and I just replaced my HD with an ssd. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't damaging the hd. BTW - not taking this as a trap. Appreciates the questions. You've helped me in the past and am not concerned.
 
You defrag an HD to move bits of information so the drive can more quickly access that information. When data is stored in random parts of a hard drive the latency to access that data is increased. There are no moving parts in an SSD, so there is no need to move bits of data around. It's bad to do this on an SSD because those bits can only be written so many times before it degrades.
 
OK thanks, this helps. I won't do it again. Hopefully I didn't do any damage the one time I did it. Is there any way to tell?
 
You didn't damage it by doing it once. There's just no need to keep doing it - zero performance increase and just useless writes to the Drive. I have an almost full, never defragmented, 4-year old SSD that runs circles around a platter Drive that's defragged regularly.
 
In fact, on a SSD you actually want your data fragmented across various flash chips as it is an increase of bandwidth to read from them concurrently.

Running defrag once didn't hurt it, you simply added a little bit of writes to the drive (which has a finite maximum).
 
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