Lately Iv'e been hearing rumors that defragging ssd's is not harmful at all because they have proved to be much more robust than earlier thought. Also that actual defragmentation as opposed to optimisation is a good thing. What prompted this, was watching Norton I S performing optimisation on C drive ssd W7hp64 and then starting defragging the drive. Iv'e never seen it do that before.
For one would turn off Norton optimization and use Windows optimization. Been many talks on does an SSD need defragging or does it do it, does it just Trim an SSD. Read some of this and link at end of article for more on it.
http://lifehacker.com/windows-does-d...kay-1666753409
No, it still applies. However, Win8+Win8.1+Win10 all use SSD recognition and optimization, which is not the same as Defragmentation. It is faster, and uses TRIM command. Defragmentation of HDDs takes quite a bit longer, and goes over about 10 passes or so to complete defragmentation.
That is why the tool is now called defragment and optimize.
+1 on what jds63 and DustSailor said. That article by Scott Hanselman that the Lifehacker article links to is my touchstone and got me past a lot of the hysteria going on out there about this. There IS something to be said about the improved resiliency of SSD NOWADAYS as opposed to when the big concern of programs defragmenting SSDs first evolved but the way data is located and accessed on an SSD kind of makes full "defragmentation" in the classical sense (and which a lot of companies have made money off of) obsolete. According to Scott H., you should be assured Windows is only doing what's necessary when necessary on an SSD (as long as it's recognized as an SSD correctly).
It looked to me like Norton Security was not up to speed on this when I put my SSD in and I could find no confirmation it WASN'T actually defragging my SSD and up to date in its treatment by Windows standards, so I shut Norton's optimization off as soon as I caught it in the act.
From what MS have written on this subject, it is not the data on the ssd that needs defragging but the file index that records the fragments. It seems there is a file system limit on the number of fragments it can handle, so the Maintanence program defrags the ssds file system records every month to keep it within those limits.
Bob Frost
This is something I'm a little confused about. I too understood that the reason MS wants/needs to do a defrag is because the file index that keeps track of the fragments has a limit as to how many fragments it can track (surprise, surprise), so MS wants to make sure that limit isn't exceeded or data problems will ensue. But I don't see how defragging the file index would accomplish anything. I.e., perhaps I just don't understand what's going on, but I don't see how defragging the index would in any way reduce the number of actual file fragments that the index has to keep track off. It seems to me the only way to ensure that the max limit of actual file fragments the index can track does not get exceeded, is to actually defrag the files in order to reduce the number of file fragments being tracked.
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