Is one defrag on an SSD really bad?

soulweeper

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Jan 26, 2012
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Reading a review for an SSD I'm considering for my laptop, I learned that you shouldn't defrag an SSD. I never knew that until about an hour ago, and in my first build last year, I used an Intel 520 series 120GB SSD, and I did defrag it a few weeks ago, as my compute was having some weird issues, so I tried all the standard things I've always gone to in a case like this....process of elimination.

Anyway, what's done is done, and I will never defrag an SSD again but.....how bad is one defrag? Obviously I shouldn't have, but what can I expect from doing that, if anything? I'm kind of concerned, as it's just over a year old.

There is 85GB used, and 26GB remaining, if that helps.

Thanks in advance!
 
One defrag? No, not even close. You're not going to be writing more than a few times per memory cell, and each cell has a write endurance of thousands of cycles.

What's really important is to disable any scheduled defragmentations, because repeated defrags would be enough to seriously shorten the lifespan of the SSD.
 

soulweeper

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Ok cool.....thank you! I freaked out a little, as I saw so much stuff saying "never" defrag an SSD.

Yeah, no scheduled defrags on my system. I only did it as part of the "standard" list of things to try when the computer is acting weird. I've actually never seen any performance increase even the times I defragged older hard drives.
 

JPNpower

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Defrag is always done on SSDs FYI. sort of. It's called garbage collection, and the drive (re)organizes data for best performance. Also, SSDs are pretty much random access, no moving heads, so incredibly frangmented data isn't really that slow.