Should you defrag a SSD drive?

lotty1 · Post by **lotty1** » Tue Sep 27, 2011 9:27 pm

I don't know much about SSD but I have been told that defraging kills them. Is this true or a myth?

Sorry if this has already been discussed

jeebustrain · Post by **jeebustrain** » Tue Sep 27, 2011 9:53 pm

there is generally no need to defrag a SSD drive, as there are no read/write latency issues that come from the read arm having to access multiple parts of the platters. This issue just simply does not exist. I'm not aware of any actual penalties for attempting a defrag, but I would imagine that the writes involved in moving around the data would do nothing but go against the max write lifecycle of the drive.

Also, in the context of the Kronos SSD (if that is what this question was ultimately referring) - most likely the disk is either ext2/ext3 format, as the underlying OS is Linux. These disk formats do not have the same sequential byte write pattern that happens on a FAT32 and NTFS file system. File fragmentation only ever even begins to occur once the disk has reached approximately 90%+ capacity. And even then, the underlying filesystem is smart enough to optimize itself better than something on a Windows system. The OSX filesystem (HFS+) has this same set of features and also does not need defragmentation.

X-Trade · Post by **X-Trade** » Tue Sep 27, 2011 10:05 pm

Yes, that's correct. You should never defrag an SSD, 'memory stick' or 'pen drive', SD card, or any other kind of solid state storage. The main reason behind this is that they do not need it and so all it will do is needlessly reduce the lifespan of your storage with the many write operations involved.