Should You Defragment A SSD?
So called SSD hard drives are becoming increasingly popular especially in the netbook sector. Solid State Drives have several distinctive advantages like faster access times, lower power usage and being completely silent while running. The main disadvantage that you might notice especially in netbooks is the write speed of those drives which is usually lower than those of conventional hard drives.
With more and more Solid State Drives hitting the streets it is important to understand the differences. Defragmentation describes the process of physically organizing the contents of a hard drive or partition so that files will be stored close together to reduce load times.
Solid State Drives can access any location on the drive in the same time. This is one of the main advantages over hard drives. This also means that there is no need to defragment a Solid State Drive ever. These drives have actually been designed to write data evenly in all sectors of the drive which the industry is calling wear leveling. Each sector of a Solid State Drive has a limited number of writes before it cannot be overwritten anymore. (this is a theoretical limit which cannot be reached in work environments)
If you did defragment your Solid State Disk you can rest assured that you did not harm it in any way. It is just that this process is not needed and that defragmentation causes lots of write processes which means that the drive will reach its write limits sooner.
No need for defragmentation is therefor another advantage of Solid State Drives.
So called SSD hard drives are becoming increasingly popular especially in the netbook sector. Solid State Drives have several distinctive advantages like faster access times, lower power usage and being completely silent while running. The main disadvantage that you might notice especially in netbooks is the write speed of those drives which is usually lower than those of conventional hard drives.
With more and more Solid State Drives hitting the streets it is important to understand the differences. Defragmentation describes the process of physically organizing the contents of a hard drive or partition so that files will be stored close together to reduce load times.
Solid State Drives can access any location on the drive in the same time. This is one of the main advantages over hard drives. This also means that there is no need to defragment a Solid State Drive ever. These drives have actually been designed to write data evenly in all sectors of the drive which the industry is calling wear leveling. Each sector of a Solid State Drive has a limited number of writes before it cannot be overwritten anymore. (this is a theoretical limit which cannot be reached in work environments)
If you did defragment your Solid State Disk you can rest assured that you did not harm it in any way. It is just that this process is not needed and that defragmentation causes lots of write processes which means that the drive will reach its write limits sooner.
No need for defragmentation is therefor another advantage of Solid State Drives.