Windows 10: Should SSD's be defragmented

Yep!

 

I second the "yep" or in French, "Yeppier!"

 

oui! oui!

 

Actually "spinners" also have limited number of bytes that can be written to any spot and can weaken it's magnetic properties. SSDs also use What is wear levelling of SSD drives? - Quora to spread number of writes to as many cells as possible. Some have an invisible partition for that while others just use whatever free space there is.

 

Hi,

I realize this is an old thread but some of the questions remain unanswered.
I'll give it a shot:

Regarding Diskeeper, depending on the version you're using but 2012 should for sure, it automatically recognizes the type of drive and adjusts its engine all by itself.
I've used it both privately and at the company (Siemens-Nixdorf) for over two decades with no issues whatsoever.

In fact it not only does it do its job but it also prevents fragmentation in a clever way prolonging life expectancy of any disk.

This is by no way sales pitch, just wanting to put the record straight.

Cheers, *Wink

 

All I know is that both of mine, 6 and 3 year old still run as new although both have OS. ~35 and ~15 TB written. Except for occasional forced trim, never have I done anything else to them but even that didn't show any improvements. Autodefrag turned off.
Both were cheapest SSDs I could find at the time. I lost 2 HDDs during same time. If I had money for a 2 - 3TB SSD, I would change 2 other HDDs in a flash.

 

Hi there
@CountMike

I'd change to SSD's too in a flash - however I've around 18 TB on my NAS - that would probably need me to win the Lottery TWICE RUNNING !!! eventually SSD's (or even something newer) will be affordable -- also power here is probably the cheapest on the planet -- all geothermal and hydro - and heat problems aren't even on the horizon so I'll probably just have to stick to spinners and use smaller SSD's for OS boots / scratch work areas like photoshop layers and video edits.

Now for SSD's (or essentially any modern SATA SPINNERS too) NEVER defrag -- not worth it - for spinners the whole wretched process can take HOURS - simply backup and restore --(Image not clone) and that will be more effective by far especially when using something like macrium which uses "intelligent sector copying".

In all the years I've been using windows --over a quarter of a century (sounds longer than 25 years !!) I've never seen ANY significant improvement by using defrag.

If you've got HDD problems it's usually 100% that they are SLOW clunkers with a tiny cache -- modern ones are fast have decent size cache and should eliminate performance bottlenecks.

As for SSD's - just leave them alone -- they will be fast enough for whatever you are doing. If you really want to be a "Speed Freak" then pair 2 SSD's together --same size -- and run them as a RAID 0 array -- then you should get some speed --although RAID 0 has no data redundancy so if 1 SSD fails you lose data on both - but they are so reliable and if you take backup it's a perfectly acceptable risk.

(You can do the same with HDD's too - but these days SSD's are actually MORE reliable than spinners -- just look up the MTBF rates (for our Non Engineering colleagues - that's Mean Time before Failure - usually published in the detailed spec for the devices in question on the manufacturers site).

On Linux use SOFTWARE RAID - mdadm.

On Windows if you aren't using hardware RAID use the Windows storage space to create a "software Raid 0 array- or storage space".

Cheers
jimbo

 

I know of no manufacture that recommends defraging their SSD.
All I use is the Intel Toolbox about once a week. Of course I have Intel SSD's.

Just for S/G I did defrag one of my SSD's. It was a waste of time. Didn't help or hurt.
Most likely just a lot of reads and wrights that didn't need to be done.

Jack

Jack