ssd defrag?

hey what if my c:drive (ssd ) becomes fragmented ? should i defrag it ? i have heard that u shouldn't defrag ssd's thanks

You should never defragment an SSD. Defragging an SSD will result in considerably shortening the practical lifespan of the SSD for absolutely no benefits at all.

King Arthur said:

You should never defragment an SSD. Defragging an SSD will result in considerably shortening the practical lifespan of the SSD for absolutely no benefits at all.

Hi there.

Agreed -- the topic has been done to death anyway.

Now YOU could have answered your own question -- What is defragging a disk -- simply over time files get split - they are allocated in chunks - so when a file needs to increase the OS allocates another piece of the disk and stores the address in an index (on the disk). So to retrieve the data for example the OS has to read the file address pieces - and then retrieve the file. Each piece is stored at a different address so the HDD has to physically move (or the heads) to the position to get the data -- this involves the physical delay due to rotation of disk and time the access mechanism takes to position over the piece you want. (Read time as well but that is quite fast compared with the other delays).

Defragging simply re-arranges the files into as many contiguous pieces as possible minimizing the disk head and access method movement when retrieving the file.

Now an SSD has NO moving parts so any address (like an array in RAM) is just as good as any other address so the data can be accessed almost instantly - even in a long fle chain.

If you did actually defrag an SSD the performance improvement would probably be so small as to be not measurable on a home computer - and the wear on the SSD wouldn't be worth it -- although these days SSD's have just as long a life (if not longer) than typical classical HDD's.

Like most things with computers there's usually a reason -- try and work out what's really happening and you'll soon see the answers become pretty obvious.

Cheers
jimbo