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SSD's and Defragmentation
Hi All:
By now the savvy readers of this forum all know that defragmenting a Solid State Drive (SSD) is not only futile but can actually shorten the life of the drive through excessive writes.
Now there's another reason that it doesn't make sense.
"Solid state drives use a technology called wear leveling to extend the lifetime of the device. Storage sectors on Flash drives have limited write-cycles which means that they cannot be written to anymore eventually. Wear leveling is used to avoid heavy use of specific sectors. With Solid State Drives it’s not possible to save data to a specific sector of the drive. The wear leveling mechanism makes sure that the data is evenly distributed on the drive."
Quote Source: Solid State Drives And Encryption, A No-Go?
The article is actually talking about Encryption but the last line of the above paragraph jumped out at me.
Defragmenters work by positioning files on the hard drives to make them contiguous thereby speeding up access times and reducing head thrashing. This requires them to have direct access to the drives.
SSD's, however, are written to by the wear-leveling mechanism; this suggests to me that defragmention programs no longer have their normal direct access.
So, even though the pretty graphic display shows all your files nicely lining up, the true state of the drive is hidden from view (and direct access) by the wear-leveling mechanism. Bottom line? A total waste of time.
Any thoughts?