Does it make sense to defrag a SSD?
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Saw an article this morning recommending that you run the command: "Defrag C:" from time to time on your SSD drives. But does it make sense to defrag a SSD? I can understand that it is of value on old spinning disk hard drives, where fragmentation can cause the reader to physically jump from fragment to fragment, but a SSD has no moving parts. What do the experts say?
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
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Saw an article this morning recommending that you run the command: "Defrag C:" from time to time on your SSD drives. But does it make sense to defrag a SSD? I can understand that it is of value on old spinning disk hard drives, where fragmentation can cause the reader to physically jump from fragment to fragment, but a SSD has no moving parts. What do the experts say?
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
No - all it will do is 'burning' write cycles, which shortens the life of the drive
"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." ― Gerald Weinberg
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No - all it will do is 'burning' write cycles, which shortens the life of the drive
"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." ― Gerald Weinberg
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No - all it will do is 'burning' write cycles, which shortens the life of the drive
"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." ― Gerald Weinberg
Agreed. Steve Gibson (author of [Spin-Rite](https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm)) has discussed this numerous times on his [Security Now](https://twit.tv/sn) podcast, and it makes zero sense to "defrag" an SSD. Some people have called him a quack, and I originally sided with them (somewhat), but after listening to his podcast for nearly a decade, it's clear he's technical to an extreme and very knowledgeable. When he does a deep dive into some technical matter, I think he always makes a lot of sense. He's not clickbait-y and doesn't make outrageous claims. Not that I had any doubt, when it comes to defragging an SSD. But his explanation for it (I don't have a show number for it, sorry) just sealed the deal for me.
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Saw an article this morning recommending that you run the command: "Defrag C:" from time to time on your SSD drives. But does it make sense to defrag a SSD? I can understand that it is of value on old spinning disk hard drives, where fragmentation can cause the reader to physically jump from fragment to fragment, but a SSD has no moving parts. What do the experts say?
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
Does a "defrag" use less space? Are there fewer "pointers" to follow? How much can you "save" in extreme cases? Is space a concern on a "maxed out" SSD?
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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Saw an article this morning recommending that you run the command: "Defrag C:" from time to time on your SSD drives. But does it make sense to defrag a SSD? I can understand that it is of value on old spinning disk hard drives, where fragmentation can cause the reader to physically jump from fragment to fragment, but a SSD has no moving parts. What do the experts say?
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
Defragging an SSD makes no sense, but trimming does. SSD TRIM is an ATA command that enables an operating system to inform an SSD drive which data blocks it can erase because they are no longer in use. The use of TRIM can improve the performance of writing data to SSDs and contribute to longer SSD life. This is an expensive operation, which is why it isn't performed after every time a block is released. See this explanation by Kingston Technology, a RAM and SSD drive manufacturer: [The Importance of Garbage Collection and TRIM Processes for SSD Performance](https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/pc-performance/ssd-garbage-collection-trim-explained)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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Agreed. Steve Gibson (author of [Spin-Rite](https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm)) has discussed this numerous times on his [Security Now](https://twit.tv/sn) podcast, and it makes zero sense to "defrag" an SSD. Some people have called him a quack, and I originally sided with them (somewhat), but after listening to his podcast for nearly a decade, it's clear he's technical to an extreme and very knowledgeable. When he does a deep dive into some technical matter, I think he always makes a lot of sense. He's not clickbait-y and doesn't make outrageous claims. Not that I had any doubt, when it comes to defragging an SSD. But his explanation for it (I don't have a show number for it, sorry) just sealed the deal for me.
dandy72 wrote:
Some people have called him a quack
dandy72 wrote:
it's clear he's technical to an extreme and very knowledgeable
You can be both you know. :-)
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
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Saw an article this morning recommending that you run the command: "Defrag C:" from time to time on your SSD drives. But does it make sense to defrag a SSD? I can understand that it is of value on old spinning disk hard drives, where fragmentation can cause the reader to physically jump from fragment to fragment, but a SSD has no moving parts. What do the experts say?
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
The short answer is, yes, Windows does sometimes defragment SSDs, yes, it's important to intelligently and appropriately defrag SSDs, and yes, Windows is smart about how it treats your SSD. The real and complete story - Does Windows defragment your SSD? - Scott Hanselman's Blog[^]
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
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Saw an article this morning recommending that you run the command: "Defrag C:" from time to time on your SSD drives. But does it make sense to defrag a SSD? I can understand that it is of value on old spinning disk hard drives, where fragmentation can cause the reader to physically jump from fragment to fragment, but a SSD has no moving parts. What do the experts say?
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
To my knowledge, this happens automatically anyway, but in the form of TRIM, whereby unused blocks are cleaned in some way. But that happens automatically, as far as I know. In the Samsung FAQs, they also specifically recommend against using any kind of defragmentation as that will cause additional writes, which in turn shortens the lifespan of the SSD. :)
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Saw an article this morning recommending that you run the command: "Defrag C:" from time to time on your SSD drives. But does it make sense to defrag a SSD? I can understand that it is of value on old spinning disk hard drives, where fragmentation can cause the reader to physically jump from fragment to fragment, but a SSD has no moving parts. What do the experts say?
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
Good question. Other comments favor NO or just TRIM (which is something else and was an issue when, long time ago, you couldn't yet set things up to do this automatically). Arguments on the hardware side are pretty convincing, but then still: - hardware: why is reading/writing the same bytes in different sized packages so much slower for small packages? - what about the OS having to emit many more diskrequests, switching from user mode? Can't that slow things down? - and finally, what about measuring? My impression is that it does make a difference. So, max once a month, when I believe it is useful, I do a full defrag. There is (in my case) an argument against in differential backup (diskimage): defrag will cost many more backup bites than without defrag, so much so, after a few backups, that a new complete backup is an option. So, I will lower my defrag frequency even more to say once in 3 months. Never say never!
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The short answer is, yes, Windows does sometimes defragment SSDs, yes, it's important to intelligently and appropriately defrag SSDs, and yes, Windows is smart about how it treats your SSD. The real and complete story - Does Windows defragment your SSD? - Scott Hanselman's Blog[^]
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
I respectfully disagree. Windows recognizes that your drive is an SSD and doesn't do it. Instead, there are other optimizations that Windows does to SSDs that are good to keep it working well. From my reading and understanding over the years, defragmenting, however, does nothing at all to an SSD drive except needlessly burn read/write cycles. If you know of information supporting your viewpoint, I'd love to read about it.
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I respectfully disagree. Windows recognizes that your drive is an SSD and doesn't do it. Instead, there are other optimizations that Windows does to SSDs that are good to keep it working well. From my reading and understanding over the years, defragmenting, however, does nothing at all to an SSD drive except needlessly burn read/write cycles. If you know of information supporting your viewpoint, I'd love to read about it.
Keefer S wrote:
If you know of information supporting your viewpoint, I'd love to read about it.
You read the link?
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
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The short answer is, yes, Windows does sometimes defragment SSDs, yes, it's important to intelligently and appropriately defrag SSDs, and yes, Windows is smart about how it treats your SSD. The real and complete story - Does Windows defragment your SSD? - Scott Hanselman's Blog[^]
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
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The short answer is, yes, Windows does sometimes defragment SSDs, yes, it's important to intelligently and appropriately defrag SSDs, and yes, Windows is smart about how it treats your SSD. The real and complete story - Does Windows defragment your SSD? - Scott Hanselman's Blog[^]
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
ok... Note of course the post is 9 years old. So maybe something has changed since then. Additionally it does not provide any references. Closest is the following
"I dug deeper and talked to developers on the Windows storage team"
The first image gives a screen shot. On my personal computer I can see that the service is not on. Which suggests that to a certain extent, if Microsoft thinks it should be happening, it is not (on my computer.) The article says this.
"First, yes, your SSD will get intelligently defragmented once a month."
And it also says the following
"Windows 7, along with 8 and 8.1 come with appropriate and intelligent defaults and you don't need to change them for optimal disk performance."
I did not change the default. And as noted it is not on. I am running Windows 10. So perhaps no longer as relevant. And at least back then, 2014, SSDs had a reliability problem. So maybe that has changed since then.
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ok... Note of course the post is 9 years old. So maybe something has changed since then. Additionally it does not provide any references. Closest is the following
"I dug deeper and talked to developers on the Windows storage team"
The first image gives a screen shot. On my personal computer I can see that the service is not on. Which suggests that to a certain extent, if Microsoft thinks it should be happening, it is not (on my computer.) The article says this.
"First, yes, your SSD will get intelligently defragmented once a month."
And it also says the following
"Windows 7, along with 8 and 8.1 come with appropriate and intelligent defaults and you don't need to change them for optimal disk performance."
I did not change the default. And as noted it is not on. I am running Windows 10. So perhaps no longer as relevant. And at least back then, 2014, SSDs had a reliability problem. So maybe that has changed since then.
Well,it was still around three years ago on windows 10, since they released a bugfix for it. Microsoft fixes Windows 10 bug causing excessive SSD defragging[^] If you think about it, it makes sense to defrag also SSDs, just not very often. If you get a lot of file fragments spread all over the disk, it will cause excessive writes since it will have to spread out the files on more blocks. Default setting since windows 8.1 is every 28 days.
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
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dandy72 wrote:
Some people have called him a quack
dandy72 wrote:
it's clear he's technical to an extreme and very knowledgeable
You can be both you know. :-)
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
:-D Fair point. But I've been listening to his podcast for over a decade, and I have come to the conclusion that those who called him a quack were just poorly informed. I forget what his exact concern was (something about XP's default network configuration?), but in the end he was proven right and Microsoft eventually had to seriously lock it down with SP2, which introduced (for the first time) the Windows firewall.
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Does a "defrag" use less space? Are there fewer "pointers" to follow? How much can you "save" in extreme cases? Is space a concern on a "maxed out" SSD?
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
-
The short answer is, yes, Windows does sometimes defragment SSDs, yes, it's important to intelligently and appropriately defrag SSDs, and yes, Windows is smart about how it treats your SSD. The real and complete story - Does Windows defragment your SSD? - Scott Hanselman's Blog[^]
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
I've only read bits and pieces of Scott's article, looking for specific keywords, but (I think) what he fails to mention is that Windows has *adapted* its defrag approach so it now knows how to tell an SSD apart from a spinner. I believe there were justified concerns at the time, when SSDs first came out (if I remember my timeline correctly), XP's defragger just treated all drives like any spinner (the only thing it knew about) and blindly tried to run the defrag code that only made sense for traditional drives. It's only later that MS introduced the Trim command to Windows.
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I've only read bits and pieces of Scott's article, looking for specific keywords, but (I think) what he fails to mention is that Windows has *adapted* its defrag approach so it now knows how to tell an SSD apart from a spinner. I believe there were justified concerns at the time, when SSDs first came out (if I remember my timeline correctly), XP's defragger just treated all drives like any spinner (the only thing it knew about) and blindly tried to run the defrag code that only made sense for traditional drives. It's only later that MS introduced the Trim command to Windows.
The trim command was introduced with win 7 iirc
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
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:-D Fair point. But I've been listening to his podcast for over a decade, and I have come to the conclusion that those who called him a quack were just poorly informed. I forget what his exact concern was (something about XP's default network configuration?), but in the end he was proven right and Microsoft eventually had to seriously lock it down with SP2, which introduced (for the first time) the Windows firewall.
I remember him alright. He isn't a quack, but has a tendency to fight windmills. :)
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
