Fragging wonderful: The truth about defragging your SSD Sep 5, 2013 3:00 AM With smarter file systems, faster disks and PCs, file fragmentation isn't the performance suck it once was. Older computers had a habit of splitting files and spreading the parts all over your hard drives, but modern ones don't do this as much. Not even close. That said, a bimonthly pass with a capable defragger can help you keep peak performance on a heavily-used hard drive. SSDs (Solid State Drives, which use flash memory instead of a hard drive platter to store data) are another story: My tests showed little or no benefit from running a number of disk defragmenters on a heavily-used SSD drive. Conventional logic dictates that you should never defrag an SSD because the SSD controller writes data scattershot-fashion to multiple NAND chips and locations, using algorithms that only the controller understands. The operating system sees it as a hard drive with sectors, but the data is spread all over the drive by the controller. Defragging these "sectors" is like trying to make a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded: You can feel parts of the pattern, but you can't see the whole picture. In addition, NAND is good for only a few thousand write cycles, so defragging can reduce lifespan by unnecessarily writing data to the SSD. Despite those arguments, there are at least four defragging utilities that purport to increase SSD performance through optimization: Auslogic's Disk Defrag Pro, Condusiv's DiskKeeper, Raxco's PerfectDisk, and SlimCleaner. To understand how this might even possibly be of benefit, let's review a few facts. Note: Clicking the linked names of the software products within the article will take you to pages or websites where you can get them.
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