Should You Or Should You Not Defrag An SSD

Summary:

 

It's useful to defrag a hard drive with physical moving parts, how about an SSD? Should you or should you not defrag SSD? This tutorial helps you decide whether defrag SSD or not, and the best solution to optimize SSD on your own.

"Should you defrag SSD twice a year or never? When I raised the question, it became a controversial issue argued by my friends. One of them holds the opinion that I should defrag the SSD at least twice a year because the defragging can accelerate the read and write speed of data, while the other stands on the opposite side and insists that I should never defrag SSD because there is no good in doing it, instead it will reduce SSD performance. Now I am totally confused who is right. I heard many people defragging their hard drives, is there any difference if it's a solid state drive?"

Basic Understanding of Defragmentation

Defragmentation exists to re-arrange data to maximize read performance of a spinning magnetic medium and a flying read head. Pretty much everyone has defragged their hard disk once or twice to achieve better performance. However, it often happens among hard disk drives (HDDs). Why do we defragment a hard disk in the first place? Since spinning hard disk reads and writes data sequentially, it takes longer for the drive to read a file if parts of the file are located on different parts of the disk. It's definitely useful to defrag an HDD, now how about an SSD designed with totally different mechanism?

A solid state drive stores data altogether in one unit, and it accesses memory randomly other than sequentially like an HDD. This is why the reading and writing speed of data in an SSD is faster than that of an HDD. From this point, it doesn’t matter if the parts of the file are spread in many different places on an SSD because the performance will remain the same. 

Conclusion: SSD Defragment Is Pointless

The topic "should you or should you not defrag an SSD" now arrives at a conclusion: it's unnecessary to defrag an SSD considering that the data is being read randomly because you don't need to put all of the sectors of any given large file together to reduce seek time. 


 IMPORTANT

Apart from the factor of being useless, people should have the general knowledge that an SSD has the finite lifespan which will be reduced if you defragged the drive causing tons of small write accesses.