Should SSDs be defragmented?

If you are a longtime computer user, you may have read somewhere or heard by word of mouth that when a hard drive shows signs of slowing down, it is time to perform a process called defragmentation. But is that advice relevant in today's era of ubiquitous solid-state drives (SSDs)? Let's find out what defragmentation does and whether your SSD needs it or not!

What is defragmentation?

Defragmentation or defragging is the process of organizing and rearranging data on a storage device, such as a hard drive, so that the data is stored in contiguous blocks. This can help improve the performance and speed of your device.

The reason is that for traditional hard drives, data is stored on spinning disks called hard disks. When a file is saved, it is divided into smaller pieces called blocks, which are scattered across the hard disks. When the computer needs to access a file, it has to read blocks from many different locations on the hard disk, which can take longer than reading all the blocks from a single location. Defrag rearranges the blocks of files so that they are stored together, helping the computer to access files faster.

In other words, defragmentation is the restructuring of both data blocks stored in the hard drive so that they are located close together in physical space, which can potentially speed up read times when accessing data on the drive.

Should SSDs be defragmented? Picture 1

SSD drives don't need to be defragmented

The way SSDs work makes the benefits of file fragmentation almost insignificant, and can even cause unwanted 'side effects'.

SSDs don't take much longer to access data from any location than it does from another. In fact, if different pieces of data are stored in a memory chip that uses different memory channels, retrieving the total data can be even faster due to the bandwidth of the multiple channels and the chip being connected. fit.

While you can certainly run the defragmentation process on your SSD, with that said, you most likely won't notice any difference in performance. Plus, there are potential risks that you should be aware of.

Defragmentation for SSDs: Advantages and disadvantages

Defragmentation is not recommended for SSDs as it has the potential to reduce drive performance and lifespan. This is because SSDs have a limited number of write cycles, and defragmentation can use up a significant portion of these cycles, resulting in performance degradation over time.

In addition, defragmentation can be time consuming, especially on large SSD drives. Because of the way SSDs read and write data, asking the drive to erase and rewrite itself can essentially saturate the drive's resources as it shuffles data to and from the cache while writing to built-in memory cells. fit.

Better ways to speed up SSD

Instead of thinking about the defragmentation process, here are some measures you can try to speed up your SSD.

1. Trimming : Trimming is a process that helps maintain the performance of an SSD by deleting blocks of unused data and 'refreshing' them for reuse. This can help prevent the SSD from becoming cluttered with unused data, which in turn slows it down. Your operating system may have implemented the TRIM command or some more modern equivalent without your knowledge. Modern SSDs are smart enough to perform this type of maintenance independently without notice.
2. Overprovisioning : Overprovisioning is setting aside a portion of the SSD's capacity for use by the drive's firmware. This can help improve the performance and life of the drive by reducing the number of write cycles and providing more space for the drive to store data. In most cases, drives have built-in automatic over-redundancy, but some drive manufacturers allow users to modify the excess redundancy using a proprietary utility application.
3. 'Cleaning' the hard drive : Keeping the SSD free of unnecessary files and programs can also help improve the drive's performance. This can be done by regularly deleting unused files and uninstalling unnecessary programs.

Overall, there are many ways to get more performance on an SSD, but defragmentation is not one of them.

David Pac

Update 27 June 2023