Should I use Defraggler on my SSD?

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Pkron17

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Oct 24, 2014
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I have a Dell XPS 13 9343 with an SSD. I opened Defraggler to optimize the drive and it says that 31% of my storage is fragmented. I have heard things about it not being good to defragment an SSD, but I am not 100% sure. Is it Ok to defragment an SSD? And if so, are there any drawbacks?
 
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No. The way an SSD stores data is completely different than an HDD.
With an HDD, it is very beneficial to have a specific "file" in one contiguous block. Also, to have ALL the data as close to contiguous as possible.

With an SSD, the drive firmware moves bits around as needed, for wear leveling among the cells. But due to the almost zero seek time, your system and you, the user, does not notice this.


It won't cause instant death of the SSD, but it won't show you any benefit.
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I've always been told yes.
I have mine set up for once a week and have been on SSD's for several years without any issues.

If I recall correctly with an SSD it's less of a performance thing than it is tidying up usable space, which is more noticeable on a HDD since theoretically you are also limiting arm seek distance.
To be fair though I've never let any drive I've ever had fragment enough to notice a performance difference, HDD or SSD, after a defrag.
 
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No. The way an SSD stores data is completely different than an HDD.
With an HDD, it is very beneficial to have a specific "file" in one contiguous block. Also, to have ALL the data as close to contiguous as possible.

With an SSD, the drive firmware moves bits around as needed, for wear leveling among the cells. But due to the almost zero seek time, your system and you, the user, does not notice this.


It won't cause instant death of the SSD, but it won't show you any benefit.
 
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Solution


Okay. Thanks!
 
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Really?
Several IT friends of mine defrag the SSD's here at work and my other friend works in a data center and they both said it's a good idea but admittedly I wouldn't probably see a difference.
Is there a difference between Enterprise applications and the number of read/writes vs. the average consumer?
(Not trying to hijack the thread)
 
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SSD's have a warranty of X years, or (some number) of total bytes written. This may be 75 or 150TBW.
What that actually means is that each individual cell can only be written to so many times before it starts to die.

The drive firmware moves bits around, to even out the use of each cell. Wear leveling.
Defrag is just more writes to those cells, when it is not needed.


Consider a pencil and piece of paper. Write a word. Erase it. Write again in exactly the same spot, erase. Repeat. Before too long, you've worn through the paper, and that place can't be used again.
But if you erase it, and then write on a whole other part of the paper, it will last MUCH longer.
This is what the drive firmware does. Letters are scattered all over the page.

Defrag = erasing the whole page, and writing new. Just one more write cycle to that little patch of paper. Unneeded wear.
 
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I hear 2 schools of thought:

1. "I feel more useful and helpful if I keep cleaning the car whether it needs it or not."

2. "With every cleaning, you are removing a very, albeit, thin layer of paint from the car."

After your 10th build, you kind know what school you are at.
 
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Hi! I know it's a beat down inquiry, but I finally was forced into research mode due to necessity. So here's my experience. If you find gold, take it and leave the rest...

SSD's... To Defrag or not to Defrag. That is the question...

I just did a major upgrade to my main boxes in my home LAN. I have 12 systems, but only use 3-4 on a regular basic and only 2 frequently with
just one as my main box that I do all of my daily administration from, in addition to personal stuff like mail, etc.

This upgrade involved setting up 5 systems as dual-boot Win7/Win10 64 boxes, all but one has dual SSD's in them in addition to 3000 HDDs for
storage. Only kidding, but I have a LOT of storage being the collector that I am and one box just lives as a backup box for the entire LAN. It's many TB's. (If you're interested the dual boot single ssd system, it works great. I setup Win10 first and partitioned the drive right down the middle installing Win10 on the first partition. I then installed Win7 on the second partition and it all works beautifully. Backups are a breeze and I use the Win7 side for creating backup images of the drive. Screwed up the seven side trying to restore from the previous setup to see if it would fly, it didn't, but Win10 still ran fine and restored the whole drive with the fresh install backup and it was like nothing happened. (I didn't over provision this 240gb ssd though for obvious reasons.))

After cruising the net extensively and reading up on the subject and all the various mfg.'s data on drives I have installed, OCZ & SanDisk
Extreme's (primarily), I have come to the conclusion that a defrag once a year would not adversely affect the longevity based on MTBF hours
(1m+) after getting all the heavy read/write data off the ssd's and onto hdd's like the indexing, page file, documents etc. I have all my non
static data on hdd's and the ssd's are for loading and running only in addition to over provisioning all the ssd's by 50%. This is where
defragging comes in and as a side benefit the darn things are even faster now which I wasn't expecting!

I set the dual ssd's, one for each OS, up using the defaults that winder's wants to use, the entire drive with the system reserved partition. After installing one of the ssd's utilities I discovered over provisioning and no all offer that. After boning up on the subject I thought this is great! Two for the price of one! You see basically it mean "shrinking" the drive or better yet, only initially partitioning to half its size during install leaving half the drive as RAW which never gets read or written to thus preserving the ever valuable life of the chips we're all pining over. When the "in use chips" are down and start dying you simply extend the drive whatever you feel comfortable with (I am just going to open the entire thing up at that point and call it the second life of the drive) to provide virtually new unused drive memory/space for use.

Cool, huh! I thought so...

This is why I used Defraggler and forced the Defrag option on the drives to get all the data moved to the front of the drive so I could shrink
it to half the size (240gb effective sizes were somewhere around 112gb partition and 111gb RAW) all of which was done from the Disk Management snap in, but I needed Defraggler to "see" where the data was on the drive and get it moved from the end until I got it sized, "shrunk" to where I wanted it. In the future I will simply just do the provisioning during initial OS partitioning setup. Much faster and easier way of accomplishing the end result.

As a benefit, the systems are definitely noticeably faster after defragging (they've been in service for about a year now), almost instantaneous response times and I have saved fresh working memory for years down the road when the first half of the drive starts getting worn out.

So in my experience defragging my ssd's for the purpose of shrinking or "over provisioning" it was a win-win.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Cheers!
 
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SSD's don't work like that.
The 'location' of the data is completely subject to what the drive firmware wants to do. Not any 'defrag' solution.
 
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