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SSD Defrag
- Thread starter Nismo
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drescherjm
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Free space defragmentation (which even free defraggers have) is fine to run a few times a year. Defragmentation designed for harddrives is not and could actually reduce performance.
I doubt there is any benefit.
drescherjm
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Correct. This can actually reduce your performance and it will also cause unnecessary writes.
So, just disable the schedule in Windows Defrag? Or is there something else I can do to make sure it never gets turnned on?
I'd still like to Defrag my WD Black Data drive on occation.
If you disabled the schedule, then all drives do not get defragged automatically. I'd like to just diable the SSD schedule and leave the other drive activley defragging on a schedule. Is that possible?
I'd still like to Defrag my WD Black Data drive on occation.
If you disabled the schedule, then all drives do not get defragged automatically. I'd like to just diable the SSD schedule and leave the other drive activley defragging on a schedule. Is that possible?
As I understood it, if you installed Windows 7 onto the SSD from scratch it automatically disabled the services\features that are detrimental to SSD's.
As far as a defragger is concerned, personally speaking I would have a look at Raxco Perfect Disk, it's SSD aware and one of the better defraggers out there.
As far as a defragger is concerned, personally speaking I would have a look at Raxco Perfect Disk, it's SSD aware and one of the better defraggers out there.
drescherjm
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So you are fine. Use mydefrag or defraggler for your WDC black and leave the builtin defrag disabled.
DisrupTer911
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you can most certainly schedule your other drivers to defrag and leave your SSD disabled.
Old Hippie
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Could you find me some links that substantiate that a free defrag program also does space consolidation for SSDs?
drescherjm
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How do you do that?
If you installed W7 on an SSD with a bulk storage disk and left it alone like everybody says to, it's probably already doing this. If you installed on an SSD and immediately checked the services and went "OMG DISK DEFRAGMENTER IS STILL SCHEDULED IT DIDN'T SEE MY SSD" <disable>, then you need to re-enable it and notice in the actual schedule that while it does run weekly or whatever the default is, none of the SSD disks are selected.
Old Hippie
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Just out of curiosity what do you think you're gaining by defragmenting files or consolidating free space? I haven't seen any data from any impartial source that would indicate there was any advantage to this. I'm sure all these companies have all sorts of graphs and tables showing huge gains but I'd hardly call that impartial...
That's my question as well - the purpose of defrag is to put files together to eliminate seek times on mechanical hard drives. Since SSDs have esentially no seek time, I don't see the purpose in worrying about fragmentation.
And even if you don't do a fresh Win 7 install (cloning a drive, for instance) it'll still disable defrag for the SSD. The service will be running and scheduled but, as -Dragon- said, it should automatically de-select the SSD.
Further to the point a defragmented SSD as seen from the system doesn't mean it's actually defragmented on the actual chips, the SSD controller has 100% free reign and authority to put that data anywhere it dang well pleases. Even if you manage to get that 5GB read only file into 100% contigious cells right now, over the course of the next few years the controller will move chunks of it all over the place on the physical cells, moving it to more worn areas to help with wear leveling.
I didn't stop any defrag services, so if the schedule says enabled, how do you tell if it's skipping your C drive (SSD)?
When you looked at the scheduler, did you see any defrags scheduled for your SSD?
I can't remember exactly, being at work, but I think if you run the Defrag program and select the Schedule button it should bring up a box with the drives listed, and the SSD will either be deselected or grayed out. At least that's how mine was. You have to check it on a per drive basis, not just whether the scheduler is enabled or not.
InvisiBill
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What they said. How Windows sees the disk's layout is not how the data is actually placed physically on the SSD. The point of defragging a HDD is to get large continuous chunks of data so the read/write heads don't have to jump all over the drive (which is slow). With SSD, you have nearly instantaneous seeks which are unaffected by which flash chip the data happens to be in, plus you have the SSD's controller rearranging data for wear-leveling.
The location doesn't really affect speed, and you can't really control the location where the data ends up anyway. There may be some gain in defragmenting individual files (JkDefrag/MyDefrag's flash setting, what Defraggler does, etc.) since you would assume two reads would be slower than one.
I think it is misleading to say that SSD performance is not hurt by fragmentation. If you COULD accurately control the location of each page of data on the SSD (in reality, you cannot), and you took a 1GB file and wrote it sequentially to the SSD in one test, and in randomly located 4KB chunks in another test, you would find that the sequential file could be read back on the order of ten times faster than the randomly 4KB fragmented file, since most SSDs can do a sequential read more than ten times faster than a QD=1 4KB random read.
That being said, there are two reasons that you probably should not be worrying about defragmenting an SSD in most cases:
1) You CANNOT control which flash pages the SSD actually writes that data to. Since you cannot control data location, you cannot reliably defragment an SSD.
2) Most usage patterns will not cause fragmentation as bad as the worst-case example I mentioned above.
Although I have never tried it, you could THEORETICALLY defragment an SSD by running a standard defrag program on the SSD, then image the SSD sector by sector to another drive, then secure erase the SSD, then copy the image back to the SSD from the other drive. As far as I know, the firmware of most SSDs will tend to write such an image back mostly sequentially to physical flash memory, and since the filesystem has been defragged, the files should also be mostly unfragmented in the flash memory of the SSD. However, depending on wear-leveling and GC algorithms on the SSD, the data could get moved around on the flash pages as you write more to the SSD, so some files could again become fragmented over time. But I suspect the wear-leveling and GC is not aggressive enough in most SSDs to make that effect noticeable.
In summary, it is possible for an SSD to slow down due to fragmentation of files, but in most cases, any such slowdown should be negligible. There is little that most defrag programs can do about it in any case. But if you really want to defrag an SSD, it should be possible if you are willing to image the SSD to another drive and back, with a secure erase of the SSD.
That being said, there are two reasons that you probably should not be worrying about defragmenting an SSD in most cases:
1) You CANNOT control which flash pages the SSD actually writes that data to. Since you cannot control data location, you cannot reliably defragment an SSD.
2) Most usage patterns will not cause fragmentation as bad as the worst-case example I mentioned above.
Although I have never tried it, you could THEORETICALLY defragment an SSD by running a standard defrag program on the SSD, then image the SSD sector by sector to another drive, then secure erase the SSD, then copy the image back to the SSD from the other drive. As far as I know, the firmware of most SSDs will tend to write such an image back mostly sequentially to physical flash memory, and since the filesystem has been defragged, the files should also be mostly unfragmented in the flash memory of the SSD. However, depending on wear-leveling and GC algorithms on the SSD, the data could get moved around on the flash pages as you write more to the SSD, so some files could again become fragmented over time. But I suspect the wear-leveling and GC is not aggressive enough in most SSDs to make that effect noticeable.
In summary, it is possible for an SSD to slow down due to fragmentation of files, but in most cases, any such slowdown should be negligible. There is little that most defrag programs can do about it in any case. But if you really want to defrag an SSD, it should be possible if you are willing to image the SSD to another drive and back, with a secure erase of the SSD.
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