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#81
@pparks1
Why on earth would it bother me? What are you trying to say? What are you implying? Why does my question now become a concern for what may or may not bother me?
Think twice. Post once.
Hi,
The reasons for not defragmenting SSDs are that increasing the number of writes to the memory cells will reduce their life and secondly, that ssds do not need it since there's hardly any latency, no moving parts.
While this is all very true, nowadays the cells can take much more writes than they used to.
Moreover, I see an awful lot of people objecting to defragmenting an ssd but on the other hand they don't mind restoring system images to it etc. every other month or so resulting in even more writes.
The logic is beyond me.
The question remains, why would MS defragment an ssd when "System Restore" is set to enabled but not when it is disabled ?
That does not make any sense to me at all unless there actually is a benefit in defragmenting a ssd or it just says it "defragments" but in reality it just retrims the ssd ?
In my experience there is but I haven't bothered to gather any proof of it. Ssds are still a tad too expensive (for me at least) to run such extensive tests on.
Cheers,
Exactly. I really believe the words are very misleading. Trimming is basically erasing unused memory cells in bulk so that write requests don't have to delete/erase/write...just write. Fortunately, good backup/restore software (i.e. Macrium, and others) will issue a bulk trim command prior to restoring. Not mentioned yet, but worth noting, is the practice of "over provisioning". Leave space unused/unallocated to the system. The controller/software will use that as part of the reserve pool to greatly extend the life of the drive. Why the System Restore connection? Beats me. I have it turned off.
Hi,
Quite a few modern SSds have "Overprovisioning" built in so to speak. It's set at the factory and taken care of by the drive's controller.Not mentioned yet, but worth noting, is the practice of "over provisioning". Leave space unused/unallocated to the system. The controller/software will use that as part of the reserve pool to greatly extend the life of the drive.
This is then totally invisible to the end user.
That said, it's good practice to find out if the manufacturer recommends setting "Overprovisioning" by the user or not.
In my experience most drives with capacities that are not multiples of say 128 Gb (256,512, etc.) but lower in capacity do not require the user to set it up. (e.g. 120 Gb, 240, 480, etc.)
Still, check it out first.
Cheers,
Hi there
The performance of SSD's are so superior to spinners or anything else - so why on earth bother to do anything with them at all -- just leave them be.
If you've got performance problems on your computer (with ? your computer !!) it's 100% certain - and I mean 100% certain that it won't be because of any problems with the SSD (unless it becomes inoperative of course).
SSD's have been out long enough now - the technology is tried and tested and they probably in normal use will outlast spinners.
We still don't have enough data on these for long term archive yet - but until recently the capacity of these was just too small - however with SSD's of the 500 GB and above sizes becoming more affordable to private / home users this topic will probably become of more interest.
As an extra = I've never found defragging a disk was ever worth it in over 30 years of using Windows -- just an image dump of the HDD, reformat and restore would work - and that ALWAYS was vastly quicker than any defragging.
I've got a VM testing running continuous image dumps and restores to an old SSD to see if I can wear it out -- been running for a few days !!!! runs a complete cycle in about 2 hrs. SSD still seems OK and was an early OCX one 120 GB. Image size is around 25 GB so a reasonable test "duty cycle".
Cheers
jimbo
Hi,
Faster? Possibly. But then it automatically defragments all data on the drive during the restore process anyway.As an extra = I've never found defragging a disk was ever worth it in over 30 years of using Windows -- just an image dump of the HDD, reformat and restore would work - and that ALWAYS was vastly quicker than any defragging.
No clue why you'd want to reformat though.
People seem to think fragmentation on SSds is a non-issue but it all depends what you do with your device.
Same goes for "Overprovisioning" really. It really isn't required anymore on a home user PC.
Cheers,