Solid State Drives "SSD"

[ghomf]

Hi Defraggler Team

 

I love defraggler and I just bought a new intel SSD drive. Intel and a lot of other forums suggest that these drives do not need defragmentation and suggest turning windows defrag off. Can you write some code, that detects the use of a SSD drive and reccomend to the user that that drive does not need defragmenting. Most people have a SSD boot drive and a regular HDD in their desktops and the ability to auto exclude SSD from defragging in Defraggler would be great. You could also find other ways of enhancing the performance of these drives , Intel comes with a tool that does something like defrag which optimises the drive, perhaps there is a SDK that you can use to add this functionaility automatically in Defraggler.

 

Thanks

 

Ghomf

[redhawk]

Solid state drives do not need defragging because there is no delay associated with fragmented files, furthermore because flash memory has limited write cycles you should avoid excessive writing.

I'm not sure excluding SSDs from Defraggler is such a good idea in the end of the day if the owner wants to defrag their drive then it's their choice.

 

Richard S.

[wearenotamused]

Solid state drives do not need defragging because there is no delay associated with fragmented files, furthermore because flash memory has limited write cycles you should avoid excessive writing.

Btw...anyone out there defragging their USB thumb drive, those're flash memory, too.

 

I'm not sure excluding SSDs from Defraggler is such a good idea in the end of the day if the owner wants to defrag their drive then it's their choice.

Agreed. A warning would be fine, but stay away from hard-coded blanket assumptions that "software knows better than user". Offer the user your advice, but at some point just do as they say.

 

There's at least one benefit of defragmentation that still applies for SSDs: recoverability. If a file system gets corrupted, you stand a MUCH better chance of recovering contiguous files than fragmented ones. (The degree to which that's an understatement depends on the particular file system and nature of the data, to my knowledge. )

 

The practicality of even determining whether a drive is SS or not may well be an issue. The driver and OS intentionally abstract the details of file storage volumes. Unless Windows is aware of the difference and makes that info available through an API, a program might have to go to the effort of maintaining a database of vendor and device ID codes.

[koman90]

I wouldn't recommend it. In fact I would recommend against it.

 

Flash memory has a limited lifecycle of reads and writes. Defragmenting it eats away at this lifespan significantly.

 

Plus I have tried defragging a flash drive, it died several months later. Just goes to prove my point.

 

Many newer OSes such has windows 7 and windows 8 will automatically "TRIM" the SSD which optimizes the drive by telling it which blocks were used but are now considered empty.

 

Trimming an SSD takes only seconds and is much more safe and effective than defragmentation.

 

Rember Defragmentiation was designed to make it so the read-write head didn't have to travel as far to read or write the data; kinda like an old vinyl record but in reverse, the data starts at the center. If there are no moving parts there is no need to defragment.

 

It would be great if piriform could make derfaggler TRIM SSDs tough!

[hazelnut]

koman90 you have resurrected a thread which is almost 3 year old.

 

I will close this now.