How often do you run a Defrag on your SSD drive?

[GoodEnough]

Just I did my first defrag after about 2 years on this OS install.

How often do you run a Defrag on your SSD drive?
Does it wear out the SSD faster if you do it too often?

 

[Essence_of_War]

There is no reason to defrag modern SSDs. It doesn't improve performance, all it does is wear down your NAND.

 

[MustISO]

Never, defrag disabled

 

[GoodEnough]

Ok, I guess I did it once, and won't do it again.

 

[redzo]

As far as I know, modern OS's like Windows 8/7 handle ssd's differently than their mechanical counterparts.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRealAndCompleteStoryDoesWindowsDefragmentYourSSD.aspx
As far as I know, Windows Storage Optimizer runs on a scheduled basis even for SSDs by default in Windows 8.

 

[Puffnstuff]

If you have a defragger be sure to tell it to leave the ssd alone. Windows garbage collection goes hand in hand with (TRIM) and will handle the necessary stuff.

 

[KentState]

Access on an SSD is not limited by physical location like on a hard disk.

 

[Berryracer]

Never, defragmentation is last decade stuff. I don't even defrag my external HDDs, with today's super fast PCs, it doesn't make on bit of a difference

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Seems this item had long been discussed to death.

I defragged an SSD once --- by accident!

I have hard disks on a regular defrag schedule, but the way I now use HDDs, there's not much fragmentation anyway.

If I'm converting an HDD boot/system disk w SW to an SSD, I follow this plan:

1) Clean up any red or yellow bangs in the Event logs that are not benign. Sometimes this could mean tweaking the size of the "system reserved" volume or correctly configuring VSS and volume shadow copy -- needed for various kinds of backups. Or it means tracking down software that misbehaves -- any number of fixable things.

2) run SFC /SCANNOW to be sure of no OS corruption. I've even had "false positives" for a remnant of an old software program and C++ redistributable component, so it can be a matter of judgment.

3) run CHKDSK for thorough detection and repair at next bootup, review the results.

4) Defrag the HDD.

5) Clone the HDD to SSD with software that ASSURES proper SSD alignment; pull the HDD and keep as backup if you wish.

6) disable any defragmentation for the boot-system SSD. Das Ende. Finito. Period. Done!

 

[tweakboy]

You cant defrag on win8 . no matter whats the program If you go to do it youll see it wont let you do it, thx Its disabled by stock install.

 

[Cerb]

None. I've defragged my previous HDD zero times, current one zero times, and the one before that all of twice (to no benefit, that I could see, even using >90% of the space).

Without a program that creates bad fragmentation, like some accounting programs I've seen (TBF, the few that I've seen that don't use many files for data, rather than a single file per client, so can't be sped up via defrag), it's barely, or not, worth it, even for HDDs. I think it's high time NTFS got replaced, but it was designed well, and with enough flexibility that Microsoft has been able to tackle such problems as bad fragmentation well, without creating FS incompatibilities.

Access on an SSD is not limited by physical location like on a hard disk.

But, like a hard disk, it is limited by logical location, which is all the file system knows or cares about.

 

[ronbo613]

I'm on my fourth SSD and I have defragged them, collectively and individually, a grand total of zero times.

 

[Batmeat]

SSD = never
Sata = never
Servers = scheduled once a week

 

[HOSED]

I have seen this SW touted on another popular forum http://www.raxco.com/home/products/perfectdisk-pro I may do some basic benchmarks (Crystal Disk), run the trial version and see if there are any real world or "statistical" gains. If someone has tested with it, would be interesting to hear from them.

 

[ronbo613]

I have seen this SW touted on another popular forum http://www.raxco.com/home/products/perfectdisk-pro I may do some basic benchmarks (Crystal Disk), run the trial version and see if there are any real world or "statistical" gains. If someone has tested with it, would be interesting to hear from them.

I have Raxco PerfectDisk. I got a deal on it and bought it because I have a lot of hard drives. It has one option for SSDs and that is "SSD Optimize". Most of the time, it analyzes the SSD, states the number of free space fragments and says there is no need to optimize the disk. I've run it on a couple different SSDs and I saw no real performance boost. I don't even run it unless the SSD seems slow, which is almost never. I wouldn't buy it just for an SSD.

 

[hhhd1]

I run vmware, in the past, sometime the guest OSes doesn't know that it is on an SSD and start defragmenting while idle, that was done few times.

Other than that, Never defragmented intentionally.

 

[tweakboy]

You cant defrag on win8 . no matter whats the program If you go to do it youll see it wont let you do it, thx Its disabled by stock install.

In Any OS ,, there no such thing as Defrag SSD. windows doesnt allow you.

 

[ashetos]

I've never ran defrag on a SSD but I've always wondered if there will be a measurable difference.

I've even thought of a scenario where the amount of writes are predictable If I ever feel the need to test this. This is the idea:

- I create an image of the system partition in a HDD
- I loopback mount the partition from the image in the HDD
- I defragment the image in the HDD
- I overwrite the SSD partition with the freshly defragmented HDD partition

This will produce an amount of writes that is equal to the size of the system partition.

 

[ashetos]

Also, for those who use Windows 8, it seems that most of you already defrag your SSDs:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRealAndCompleteStoryDoesWindowsDefragmentYourSSD.aspx

 

[SPBHM]

even if you have an HD, let windows handle it, windows 8 is always doing this kind of stuff automatically

 

[ashetos]

Just analyzed my C: drive and it is 16% fragmented. Could people with SSDs also post their results in this thread?

 

[mikeymikec]

Also, for those who use Windows 8, it seems that most of you already defrag your SSDs:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRealAndCompleteStoryDoesWindowsDefragmentYourSSD.aspx

TRIM is not defrag. The only way they're comparable is that TRIM is good for SSDs and defragging (not too often) is good for HDDs. They're both maintenance tasks, that's where the similarity ends.

SSDs work completely differently from HDDs, and so therefore any (appropriate) maintenance work is going to be respectively different.

If you click on 'optimise' for an SSD on a properly configured Win8x install, it even says during the optimisation, "x% TRIMed".

The author's conclusion completely negates the entire article. Instead of spending a whole article talking about "kind of defragging", they should have just clued up in the first place and posted a few helpful articles regarding how SSDs work, the write performance penalty to a page that already contains data, and how garbage collection and TRIM works.

Furthermore, if they're going to make claims like "if an SSD gets too fragmented" and quote someone, then they should cite their sources, preferably with a link to a more enlightening article. I have a feeling that the author is mixing in the quirks of NTFS together with the maintenance techniques of storage devices when they ought not to be, but without any actual technical information for the claim or any useful source, it's pretty meaningless.

In the old days, you would sometimes be told by power users to run this at the command line to see if TRIM was enabled for your SSD. A zero result indicates it is.

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

Congratulations author, incorrect again. Furthermore, it wasn't ever correct. So before you embark on your next "real and complete story", fact check first!

When I attempted to educate myself the first time about the way SSDs work, I read this article:
http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-n...ion-and-trim-in-ssds-explained-an-ssd-primer/

This one was helpful as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification

 

[ashetos]

I think you misunderstood the article. There is an actual quote from Microsoft Developers admitting that they are not TRIMming but actually defragmenting SSDs in Windows 8.

There has been proof from others as well:
http://www.outsidethebox.ms/why-windows-8-defragments-your-ssd-and-how-you-can-avoid-this/

 

[mikeymikec]

Just analyzed my C: drive and it is 16% fragmented. Could people with SSDs also post their results in this thread?

Presumably your C drive is an SSD?

I've heard of SSDs being referred to be Win7/8x as being fragmented, though I haven't had an opportunity to investigate it myself yet. Did you build this PC yourself or is it a big-name one?

My first guess is that you're not using AHCI for storage.

 

[ashetos]

I am using AHCI and it has nothing to do with fragmentation. I am using Windows 7.

You can analyse NTFS fragmentation by starting the command prompt as an Administrator and running the analysis command:
C:\Windows\system32> defrag /a C:

It takes about 30 seconds. Please post your results.