SSD Questions

[TerminatorXT]

I've heard that SSDs have a short lifetime and that defragmentation is an issue

can someone clear this up for me?

 

[sub mesa]

Yeah they only endure for about 20 - 80 years of regular/normal usage, or 10 years of continuous writing 24/7. So if you want to store pictures for the next millennium, i'm not sure if it would still be working at that time..

So lifetime is not an issue if you buy a good SSD (the intels for example). Defragmenting causes heavy fragmentation on an SSD and will only make it slower. Never defragment an SSD. If you did, zero write the whole SSD and start over.

 

[trentdk]

The average hard disk drive last about a year now anyway, lol, so the paranoia around SSD lifespans is ridiculous.

On SSDs, the act of "defragmenting" is frowned upon. A fragmented file on a SSD doesn't really mean much, (not getting into the details of custom algorithms by manus) don't "defrag" an SSD.

Not that this is an end-all answer, but if you use Windows 7, you don't have much to worry about.

 

[sminlal]

The issue with SSDs which use flash memory is that flash memory can only sustain a limited number of write cycles. SSD controllers mitigate this by a technique called "wear leveling" in which writes are spread around to different flash memory blocks. Intel claims that their drives will last for 5 years even if you write 100GB per day to them.

Defragmentation is not required for SSDs because they zero latency due to mechanical movement (ie, whatever latency they have is only due to electronically selecting and reading data from the appropriate chip). For the most part, this means that an SSD file system that's badly fragmented will perform almost as well as one that isn't.

There's a good article on SSD characteristics here.