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#11
Hi,
Defragmentation and Optimization:
All drives suffer from files being split into different locations on a drive regardless what type of drive. This can become somewhat cumbersome on typical spinners because the heads need to travel to read these blocks causing latency.
SSDs being so much faster, suffering hardly any latency at all, do not require defragmentation but do require garbage collection, i.e. cells that contain deleted or no longer used information need to be cleared and flagged as clean so these can be rewritten to.
That's what "Optimization" does in Windows on an SSD. When on a HDD it will defrag instead.
While you can defrag an SSD it causes quite a lot of writes on the drive which reduces its life. No big deal as modern SSDs can sustain an enormous amount of writes.
But, given the low inherent latency of these SSDs, why bother ?
Some people claim to never ever defrag their HDDs but instead restore an image of it. While this achieve the same end result it also rewrites everything on their drive instead of just reallocating the fragmented files. Not very disk friendly if you ask me even though they think otherwise....
There's loads of BS on the net so don't believe everything you read but try to understand how SSD and their controllers works. After that, decide what best suits your needs.
I'll be dilapidated for it but, yes, I do defragment SSDs occasionally....
Cheers,