Any benefit/harm to defragging a SSD?

[vgbaron]

Title says it all.

[NickN]

not a good thing to do right now

[vgbaron]

that's what I thought.

thanx - now get back to work!

[NickN]

quit bothering me and I will

[vgbaron]

[richardd43]

Here is an excelent review of an OCZ SSd drive. It also explains a lot about how the drives work and what maintenance needs to be done.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/ocz-summit-250gb-ssd-review/

[T1MT1M]

There is no point in defragging because all defragging is doing is arranging all your stuff on the hard drive so that you will have the lowest possible read time. On a solid state drive there is no read time so it doesnt make a difference.

[Chiari]

Ok so we don

[Slotback]

From what I understand....

Conventional Hard Drives work mechanically. A head sweeps up and down the rotating disk to read the files. If the file are fragmented into 100 peices, then the disk head has to move 100 times up and down over the disk to read the file - which is very slow. If it's in only 1 fragment, then it has to move only once to read the file.

Solid State drives are not mechanical, they use something similar to flash memory, or RAM. Obviously you do not defragment your RAM, your processors cache, or flash drives - it's pointless, impossible, and has no benefit. They are not mechanical, they do not work like normal drives.

Infact, it would be stupid to defrag an SSD. Each cell on an SSD has a limited number of writes till it stops working. So they usually have a controller on a drive that levels the wear for maximum life. Defragging would undo this and marginally reduce the life of the drive.

If I recall correctly, people recommend a drive to be less than 50% full for seek head confinement. That means the harddrive head doesn't have to move much to read the files, which is fast, as there is less distance between files usually. SSD's are non-mechanical, so you don't need to worry about keeeping the disk empty.


Not sure if its a good idea to put page file on an SSD, ask Nick.

Try downloading the Perfect Disk Manual as it has a good writeup.

[Chiari]

Tnx vodka!

mechanical drives and defrags are on our minds for about 20 years, its funny trying to forget all that suddenly lol

by the theme of the thread, maybe its worth asking if those OCZ on 200gb are fast enough, good, reliable? Nothing about the price, everyone knows ssds are still an assault, but im really thinking buying one if i could find for $300 or less

[richardd43]

by the theme of the thread, maybe its worth asking if those OCZ on 200gb are fast enough, good, reliable? Nothing about the price, everyone knows ssds are still an assault, but im really thinking buying one if i could find for $300 or less

I have not had mine long enough to say anything about the reliability but the speed is right up there. But for an extra $30 I bought the Instant Replacement Insurance for it that the local store offers just in case.

After a cold start it used to take about 15 seconds to get the first web page open, that has gone away.

OCZ has a newer drive coming out with 128M of cache which should improve the overall speed.

If/when the prices come down I plan on switching all of my boot drives to SSD

I have not tried gaming with it yet so not sure what that will be like.