Do SSDs suffer from more or less fragmentation than harddrives?

[michaelfoster]

Will I need to deframgent it more or less?

 

[daswilhelm]

SSD's do not fragment, in fact defrag is not recommended on ssd's at all.

 

[michaelfoster]

Best answer selected by michaelfoster.

 

[manofchalk]

SSD's do fragment, but because they are a different technology than HDD's, the data being scattered over a wider physical area doesn't affect performance in any way.
From my understanding of how SSD's work, SSD's attempt to be as random as possible when writing data, so I imagine that when its working correctly it is in fact if quite fragmented.

Though the first post is true, dont defragment SSD's. Gives no performance boost and uses up its read/write cycles very quickly.

 

[spawnkiller]

Personnaly i've ssen greater speed on defragmented SSD however (from testing on my own to be sure) only a 5-10% improvement is really observable... ut this 10% improvement reduce the lifespan of the SSD so you don't need to defragment SSD as 10% for reliability doesn't worth it...

 

[leonfeldman89]

SSD's do not fragment, in fact defrag is not recommended on ssd's at all.

Well technically SSD's are always 100% fragmented lol.

If you want to learn about how data is stored on multichannel flash memory, it will take a much longer discussion than you can have on any online forum, but the take away point is:

SSD's should never be "defragmented" using windows software utility.

And when I say never, I don't mean it's not recommended or it might lower the drives life(it will).
I mean the term doesn't have any meaning with flash storage because the architecture is totally different.
There are other OS processes that maximize performance for SSD's like TRIM.
If you want to learn about how that works, your best bet would be to do some independant reading not ask on forums.

Good Luck.

 

[leonfeldman89]

SSD's do fragment, but because they are a different technology than HDD's, the data being scattered over a wider physical area doesn't affect performance in any way.
From my understanding of how SSD's work, SSD's attempt to be as random as possible when writing data, so I imagine that when its working correctly it is in fact if quite fragmented.

Though the first post is true, dont defragment SSD's. Gives no performance boost and uses up its read/write cycles very quickly.

Though, you're not really wrong, talking about how SSD's write dat using the terms "random as possible" and "fragmented" is just a gross oversimplification that just breeds mountains of misunderstanding.

Don't defragment SSD's is good enough on this level I think.

 

[DavidRabahy]

Unfortunately it's a little complicated. http://ntfs.com/ntfs-mft.htm gets at it. Each record of the NTFS MFT represents a file. Really small files have their data stored right in the MFT (neat). Bigger files have one or more pointers to extents (contiguous clusters). A contiguous file has one and only one pointer to just one extent. A fragmented file has two or more extents. To defragment a file involves moving non-contiguous extents around until they are contiguous. A file with a few extents doesn't really hurt anything. A file with zillions of tiny extents all over the place is a performance problem.

SSDs don't suffer from seek latency *but* that is not the end of the story for them. As many have described thoroughly elsewhere, at first all of the capacity of an SSD is ready for immediate use. Later, when an extent is released, e.g. after a file is deleted, they require an extra step to make the released space available again which is no big deal unless you are waiting right now.

Unfortunately folks can tend to get these topics confused. They think SSDs don't suffer from fragmentation because they don't suffer from seek latency but this is not complete. For a file with zillions of extents even a mighty SSD can't hide the extra work the file system has to do.

To evaluate an SSD, Run as Administrator a command prompt;

C:\>windows\system32>defrag c: /a /v

PerfectDisk from http://raxco.com/ (as one example) goes further and reports the most fragmented files.

In my personal opinion *if* an SSD is fragmented bad enough then it is worth defragmenting occasionally even though doing so will nominally wear it out faster. Gratuitous defragmenting is to be avoided.