SSD Defragging: The safe way

[SPDIF]

If you have already defragged your SSD a few times, it won’t harm your SSD. However, it’s not a practice you should continue...
SSDs already have a better and stronger performance, they don't need any extra step to further improve it.

The short answer is this: you don't need to defrag files on SSD's, it's fast enough and designed for this problem as solution.

De-fragmentation exists only to rearrange data to maximize read performance of a spinning magnetic medium and a flying read head.
Since that is not the physical arrangement of an SSD, defragging is pointless.

But this is just some advice, everyone is free to do what they want to do with their SSD of course.

Right now i am making a test rig setup with some stuff to see what it gives.

 

[Edwired]

Giving the matter of slowdown is when the ssd is is above 85% usable space available that is used this is where it would generally slow down the ssd to the point where it recommended not to fill it up. Giving my experience on defragging the ssd it will take forever to complete whole ssd regardless of available space let alone that controller inside the ssd is trying to reorganise it own structure in the background without asking you for permission as it won't like it if you keep defragging it on a daily, weekly or monthly basis which will reduce it lifespan alot quicker.

If you have already defragged your SSD a few times, it won’t harm your SSD. However, it’s not a practice you should continue...
SSDs already have a better and stronger performance, they don't need any extra step to further improve it.

The short answer is this: you don't need to defrag files on SSD's, it's fast enough and designed for this problem as solution.

De-fragmentation exists only to rearrange data to maximize read performance of a spinning magnetic medium and a flying read head.
Since that is not the physical arrangement of an SSD, defragging is pointless.

That why the short stroking method is used on regular hard drive for example 1tb 7200rpm have fast access area on the platter from 200gb to 250gb range then after that is medium access then slow access that why is ideal to partition the hard drive three times based on the read and write access given on the hard drive. HDtune can give you that detail so you can manage it without too much trouble

 

[Deleted member 57642]

Even if typical desktop users were defragging on an SSD weekly, I bet most still wouldn't have a problem in the course of their SSD warranty period unless the SSD was really low quality or they are doing a high number of write already. Defrag or not, your still bound by the constraints of SSD flash endurance. If your only defragging maybe hundreds of megabytes weekly it won't matter much.
Defrag is not evil, or bad, just mostly undesirable because it doesn't do anything to help the SSD and adds wear for little benefit in likely a vast majority of cases - hence why it's turned off by default in Windows.
The only helpful impact of defrag now with SSD's is in specific cases where fragmentation might cause particular problems or slowdowns in filesystem overhead.
If your sophisticated enough to be impacted by filesystem overhead then defrag might be an option...especially the choice to only defrag specific folder and files.

Defragmentation was intended/created for a different tech - for Hard Disk Drives. If you still own this type of hardware - it's highly recommended/beneficial. Even more than that - if for an SSD it can lower life span - for an HDD it can actually extended it (less wear and tear). A HDD is half the size of a brick - hosting multiple disk platters which spin at 5400 RPM (mostly in portable), 7200 RPM (mostly on Desktop) and 10.000 RPM (servers and desktop). To read/write the information - the actuator Arm (as shown in the image below) keeps moving above the disk - while constantly pointing the Slider (and Head) where the information is positioned/written on the disk platter.

If the written data is scattered all over the disk platter - then obviously - the actuator has to make extra steps - which translates to higher loading times. And thus, defrgmentation was invented - re-arranging the data in such way (especially if also optimized) - that the actuator barely moves, as shown in next image:

A SOLID State Drive - on the other hand... is/works quite different - to say the least. Here's a comparative image:

And also a m2 NVMe SSD:

As can be seen above - there's a quite a big difference between an HDD and SSD. Fort start - no moving parts, no disk platter and most importantly - no need for actuator to constantly move if the drive is not defragmented.

Also, we're 2023 - 2 days from 2024. Unless you're using your system strictly for office tasks - just word, excel and mails - not even social media and such (especially YouTube) - numbers like hundreds of MB have no place in this discussion - especially on this forum where most users or gamers. And pretty sure they're not retro gamers - using an Atari and Super Nintento emulator to play old games of couple of Mb (if not Kb). Some of the modern games have more than 100Gb in size - while the bigest have over 250 Gb. Baldur's Gate 3 for example - since August had to instal it 3x times (basiclly re-install it 2x) - and that's over 100 Gb. Luckly - i still have/use and HDD for the downloading part. Taking into account both the downloads and installls - if i was to defrag it too - that's 3x Doanload + 3x install + 6x intensive write from defraging.

 

[lawood]

A tech enthusiast should defrag the SSD on a daily basis and then... replace it every 5 months or else one's narrow minded.

Another way to put it, your level as a tech enthusiast - is defined by how much tech stuff you brake - while chasing performance unicorns.

go back to reddit...

Defragmentation was intended/created for a different tech - for Hard Disk Drives. If you still own this type of hardware - it's highly recommended/beneficial. Even more than that - if for an SSD it can lower life span - for an HDD it can actually extended it (less wear and tear). A HDD is half the size of a brick - hosting multiple disk platters which spin at 5400 RPM (mostly in portable), 7200 RPM (mostly on Desktop) and 10.000 RPM (servers and desktop). To read/write the information - the actuator Arm (as shown in the image below) keeps moving above the disk - while constantly pointing the Slider (and Head) where the information is positioned/written on the disk platter.

If the written data is scattered all over the disk platter - then obviously - the actuator has to make extra steps - which translates to higher loading times. And thus, defrgmentation was invented - re-arranging the data in such way (especially if also optimized) - that the actuator barely moves, as shown in next image:

A SOLID State Drive - on the other hand... is/works quite different - to say the least. Here's a comparative image:

And also a m2 NVMe SSD:

View attachment 327390

As can be seen above - there's a quite a big difference between an HDD and SSD. Fort start - no moving parts, no disk platter and most importantly - no need for actuator to constantly move if the drive is not defragmented.

Also, we're 2023 - 2 days from 2024. Unless you're using your system strictly for office tasks - just word, excel and mails - not even social media and such (especially YouTube) - numbers like hundreds of MB have no place in this discussion - especially on this forum where most users or gamers. And pretty sure they're not retro gamers - using an Atari and Super Nintento emulator to play old games of couple of Mb (if not Kb). Some of the modern games have more than 100Gb in size - while the bigest have over 250 Gb. Baldur's Gate 3 for example - since August had to instal it 3x times (basiclly re-install it 2x) - and that's over 100 Gb. Luckly - i still have/use and HDD for the downloading part. Taking into account both the downloads and installls - if i was to defrag it too - that's 3x Doanload + 3x install + 6x intensive write from defraging.

Your answers feel like AI talking. Sad state of affairs.

 

[SPDIF]

I will do some testing here with and old SATA 870EVO and an Crucial NVMe P3, i won't use defraggler but O&O defrag Pro, that also has some special SSD functions.

 

[Bones]

NOTE:
*My own personal view - Take it or leave it for what it's worth or not to you.*

Yes - Defragging is for the older HDD's that have discs spinning in them, an SSD has no moving parts to worry about and it essentially does the same thing RAM itself will do related to the system hitting it for read and write functions.

However IF you want to do it anyway, that's your call but I'd suggest only doing it about once every 6 months, preferably once a year if you OS copy lasts that long before you have to do a reinstall.
Even with that I'd only do it if it has alot of data (Full or close to full) on it.
If it's not around 80% full or more I'd not worry about it period.

I have done it before and in my case it did seem to make a difference (System boot times and only that really) but it was nothing to write home about either.

TRIM usually does a good job of managing the file system anyway, esp if you tend to create/download alot of files and later delete them, creating alot of useless garbage in the file system.
These are the parameters I'd do it under, only with those in play at the frequency of doing it stated and no more.

As for HDD drives - Go for it.

 

[Eskimonster]

Curious about if this will cause wear on cells more, i thought the drives distributes data so all cells get used equally.
Pardon my bad english.

 

[Edwired]

That when the cells starts dying the life span goes down meaning the controller marked that section of cells as dead not useable meaning it loses the available space is inevitable

 

[cvaldes]

Curious about if this will cause wear on cells more, i thought the drives distributes data so all cells get used equally.
Pardon my bad english.

Today's onboard SSD disk controllers handle wear leveling, TRIM, bad block reallocation, and other disk maintenance tasks.

Early SSDs lacked some of this functionality built in and relied on the operating system to handle those missing tasks. Naturally, these capabilities weren't in every single operating system from the beginning nor were they implemented all at the same time by everyone all at once.

Short of the OS, you could invoke some of this stuff manually. In the same way, some UNIX old-timers will type 'sync' or 'purge' commands before shutting down even if these manual commands are completely redundant on modern systems.

Over time, many of these tasks were moved to the onboard disk controller to put less reliance on whoever wrote the operating system. You don't really want to rely on a UNIX cron job at 4am every Monday to do your disk maintenance.

But in 2023, Joe Consumer doesn't have to worry about this stuff. It's all handled by the system. There are people at Phison, Samsung, Western Digital, Seagate, wherever who get paid to think about this stuff so Gamer Dude can focus on being ultra-toxic on CoD rather than worry about using a particular NAND flash element one too many times.

 

[Wirko]

an SSD has no moving parts to worry about and it essentially does the same thing RAM itself will do related to the system hitting it for read and write functions.

That's a good analogy. But RAM fragmentation is a thing, too.

How does memory fragmentation affect algorithm performance?

Learn how memory fragmentation occurs, how it affects algorithm performance, and how to avoid or reduce it with various techniques.

www.linkedin.com

 

[A Computer Guy]

Defragmentation was intended/created for a different tech - for Hard Disk Drives.

Indeed. Likewise filesystems were also created for the tech during that time.

Also, we're 2023 - 2 days from 2024. Unless you're using your system strictly for office tasks - just word, excel and mails - not even social media and such (especially YouTube) - numbers like hundreds of MB have no place in this discussion - especially on this forum where most users or gamers.

LOL

And pretty sure they're not retro gamers - using an Atari and Super Nintento emulator to play old games of couple of Mb (if not Kb). Some of the modern games have more than 100Gb in size - while the bigest have over 250 Gb. Baldur's Gate 3 for example - since August had to instal it 3x times (basiclly re-install it 2x) - and that's over 100 Gb. Luckly - i still have/use and HDD for the downloading part. Taking into account both the downloads and installls - if i was to defrag it too - that's 3x Doanload + 3x install + 6x intensive write from defraging.

...but not every day. I'm not advocating for defragging SSD's in general but it's not the bogeyman that's going to blow up your PC either unless you abuse it vigorously.

 

[Bones]

That's a good analogy. But RAM fragmentation is a thing, too.

How does memory fragmentation affect algorithm performance?

Learn how memory fragmentation occurs, how it affects algorithm performance, and how to avoid or reduce it with various techniques.

www.linkedin.com

I'm WELL aware of that but don't forget RAM isn't used for long term storage like an SSD drive is.

 

[Mussels]

It's still new tech (and keeps evolving/improving - bot speed and reliability wise) - and only recently (past 10 year or so) - turned mainstream (used as a standard storage unit in most laptops available on market - also many many times cheaper - thus, adapted as a standard at a large scale even among desktop users). Last time i checked - derangementing an SSD was deemed as a bad thing. Checked again and still is (deemed a bad thing / not recommended). As for Microsoft having a scheduled defragmentation even for an SSD - i don't trust it. Microsoft doesn't make SSDs nor it it specialized on storage maintenance (more focused on the average Windows user - thus features like - SuperFetch/SysMain and Indexing are activated by default - which can actually be useful for the average user using small apps frequently - yet, quite catastrophic for a power user or even a gamer dabbling with multiple apps quite large in size - which translated to 100% disk usage). Even the TRIM command - which, despite proven to be beneficial (if used the correct way) - was reworked in functionality - because it also proved to be quite bad for some SDDs (Samsung 840 and 860 in particular - didn't work so well with auto-trim - thus it was disabled by default) - if used to often or while actively using the SSD. That being said - if Samsung will recommend to defrag their SSD (maybe for some future model - that can be beneficial), sure - might give that a 2nd tought, bu so far:

No, Solid State Drives do not need defragmentation because they have no moving parts and can access any location on the drive equally fast. Please disable any defragmentation utilities on your computer because they will only wear down the performance of your SSD. Visit the OS Optimization section of Samsung SSD Magician for help doing this.

Same goes for Western Digital, which deems read intensive tasks as safe - while write intensive tasks like Defrag is also flagged as doing more harm than good in the long run (by shorting the lifespan).

DEFRAG is write-intensive. It can cause the premature wearing out or degradation of the NAND (flash memory) on SSDs as data is moved and re-written elsewhere in the NAND.
CHKDSK is read-intensive. It reads or scans the disks for errors and depending on your settings, can correct it using a very small write operation that does not negatively affect the NAND in the same way that 'defrag' might.

So hey, doing a windows update or while removing/installing some major apps (that's specially the case for every modern game - while taking their size into account) - i'll issue the TRIM command manually. After decades of using HDDs - the SSD tech is still a piece of modem tech which i find highly impressive (minutes even hours - turned into secconds).

As for Baldur Gate 3, great game - but honestly - does seem ratter poorly optimized at managing storage resources. Not to mention an SSD is a main requirment - even a Minimum requirment:

MINIMUM:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• Processor: Intel i5-4690 / AMD FX 8350
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GTX 970 / AMD RX 480 (4GB+ of VRAM)
• DirectX: Version 11
• Storage: 150 GB available space on an SSD
• Additional Notes: Default API is Directx11. Vulkan 1.1 API also provided.

This being one of the reasons why I opted for the GoG version (saw a streamer with the Steam version - and that comes with Cloud Savings - which in one of his streams took at least 10 minutes to save). Tho, not entirly satisfied with the GoG versions either for somehow similar reasons. As in - instead of a patch (even big one like 10 gb or so), there's times when a new version seem to download/install the whole game all over again. Stuff like this it's why i bought an HDD, which helps only partially - cause i still have to install the whole thing.

Anyway, can't say that i ever encountered that type of issues (as shown in above images), and this is an OEM nVME SSD (quite mediocre compared to latest models). Tho, satisfies my needs and still impressed with its performance.

I love the quotes you've made, despite the fact i've proven them wrong here already.
Yes, SSDs fragment. Yes it slows things down. That's been proven here already and it's not disputable.


SSD's should not have a classic "full defrag" completed on them, and it seems you don't know what that means.

A full defrag is where every single file was defragmented and moved to the start of the disk for higher speeds. THAT is what SSD's do not benefit from, wasting writes.
"Quick" Defrags of just the worst files? It's already being done on your SSD automatically, this has been covered in the thread. This is just manual control over it.

 

[theeldest]

My goodness there's a lot of "confidently incorrect" in this thread.

I know this forum is fairly anonymous and we don't give credence to day-job credentials but I'll give you mine anyway.

I'm a lead on a performance engineering team at one of the top 5 SSD manufacturers. I've been in the storage industry for 15+ years and have been focused on SSDs for the past 10. Personally I have a lot of SSD experience. I have an extensive home lab with ~100 SSDs from various manufacturers (consumer & enterprise / SATA & NVMe / planar & 3D).

There are two main misconceptions I see in this thread:
1. Doing defrag operations will quickly use up your endurance
2. SSDs are so good at random reads that you don't need to optimize for sequential

Number 1: Endurance
This is kind of valid but very few users will use a significant portion of their drive's endurance. Before some of you tell me your anecdotes about wearing out a drive, you're in the minority. It doesn't invalidate your experience but it means it doesn't necessarily signify what others' experiences will be.

Thankfully there are drive metrics to tell you about the health of your drive. If you're concerned, monitor the situation and adjust to fit your needs and hardware..


Number 2: Sequential vs Random
The easiest way to explain this is to get to the NAND level. A NAND die will take a certain amount of time to process a transaction PLUS an amount dependant on the amount of data moved. For small transactions (<16k) the transaction processing time dominates. For example: a die takes 50us to process a transaction and it can do 4k or 64k in the same amount of time. 4k in 50us is 80 MB/s while 64k in 50us is 1.3GB/s.

You can overcome this issue through parallelism by having enough transactions in flight that across all the die & packages in an SSD you can get to the bandwidth limit by using a lot of small transactions.

The problem is that filesystem operations rarely queue up future blocks in a file read which means for "normal" operations we're in low queue depth mode which means IO latency dominates the bandwidth equation.

All this means that optimizing file layout to be sequentially laid out blocks in an SSD will improve performance at the expense of the incurred write amplification.


A number of folks have indicated that this isn't recommended by the industry but that's not entirely true. If you look at flash optimized applications they all share a primary characteristic. They will write large files and never modify. Modifications are managed by in memory data structures and when enough modifications occur the large files are read to memory, modified, then written back to disk and the old version is deleted and trimmed. This behavior prevents fragmentation as small blocks will not be modified in a larger file and it reduced write amplification on the drive by reducing garbage collection -- the application will only ever write big chunks at one time which won't need to be split up.

So while advice to consumers is to avoid defragging the big players (Meta / AWS / Google / MS / etc) in their data center applications have processes to ensure they don't fragment their data.


TL;DR: Defragging will improve performance at the cost of endurance. You probably didn't need that endurance anyway.

 

[chrcoluk]

Just use your SSD as it is meant to, you don't need any special tools for it. Just use it and don't look back! There's many things to say about it, but defragging means unnecessary wear, so don't do it. But it's your SSD, and your money, it's just advice.

I think the point here is, people are not "doing it" Microsoft automatically defrags SSDs.

Given Microsoft designed NTFS, I will trust their judgement on their own file system, from the tidbits of info released it seems it has issues (the file system itself) if there is too many fragments on metadata, especially when volume shadow copy is utilised.

I have never seen an auto defrag happen when VSS (system restore) is disabled for the drive, but some have reported in this thread it happens regardless. So non conclusive.

That's a good analogy. But RAM fragmentation is a thing, too.

How does memory fragmentation affect algorithm performance?

Learn how memory fragmentation occurs, how it affects algorithm performance, and how to avoid or reduce it with various techniques.

www.linkedin.com

It most definitely is and is probably the biggest reason PCs are faster on fresh bootup.

There is some software I have used where memory fragmentation has a very visible effect that even starts to be noticeable within 30 mins of OS uptime. It can also cause stability issues in more extreme cases.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Yeah trim is fine only issue in the past was ms was running it to much

Only thing I wish ms would stop doing is auto adding recycle bins on them.

 

[SPDIF]

So the answer remains, just use it for what it was made, and you should not have problems at all. Don't search for problems when it's not needed.

There's no need to fix something when it's not broken says common sense...

 

[lexluthermiester]

Microsoft automatically defrags SSDs.

No, Windows does NOT defrag SSD's. The Defrag service only runs TRIM functions..

 

[Daytrader]

My goodness there's a lot of "confidently incorrect" in this thread.

I know this forum is fairly anonymous and we don't give credence to day-job credentials but I'll give you mine anyway.

I'm a lead on a performance engineering team at one of the top 5 SSD manufacturers. I've been in the storage industry for 15+ years and have been focused on SSDs for the past 10. Personally I have a lot of SSD experience. I have an extensive home lab with ~100 SSDs from various manufacturers (consumer & enterprise / SATA & NVMe / planar & 3D).

There are two main misconceptions I see in this thread:
1. Doing defrag operations will quickly use up your endurance
2. SSDs are so good at random reads that you don't need to optimize for sequential

Number 1: Endurance
This is kind of valid but very few users will use a significant portion of their drive's endurance. Before some of you tell me your anecdotes about wearing out a drive, you're in the minority. It doesn't invalidate your experience but it means it doesn't necessarily signify what others' experiences will be.

Thankfully there are drive metrics to tell you about the health of your drive. If you're concerned, monitor the situation and adjust to fit your needs and hardware..


Number 2: Sequential vs Random
The easiest way to explain this is to get to the NAND level. A NAND die will take a certain amount of time to process a transaction PLUS an amount dependant on the amount of data moved. For small transactions (<16k) the transaction processing time dominates. For example: a die takes 50us to process a transaction and it can do 4k or 64k in the same amount of time. 4k in 50us is 80 MB/s while 64k in 50us is 1.3GB/s.

You can overcome this issue through parallelism by having enough transactions in flight that across all the die & packages in an SSD you can get to the bandwidth limit by using a lot of small transactions.

The problem is that filesystem operations rarely queue up future blocks in a file read which means for "normal" operations we're in low queue depth mode which means IO latency dominates the bandwidth equation.

All this means that optimizing file layout to be sequentially laid out blocks in an SSD will improve performance at the expense of the incurred write amplification.


A number of folks have indicated that this isn't recommended by the industry but that's not entirely true. If you look at flash optimized applications they all share a primary characteristic. They will write large files and never modify. Modifications are managed by in memory data structures and when enough modifications occur the large files are read to memory, modified, then written back to disk and the old version is deleted and trimmed. This behavior prevents fragmentation as small blocks will not be modified in a larger file and it reduced write amplification on the drive by reducing garbage collection -- the application will only ever write big chunks at one time which won't need to be split up.

So while advice to consumers is to avoid defragging the big players (Meta / AWS / Google / MS / etc) in their data center applications have processes to ensure they don't fragment their data.


TL;DR: Defragging will improve performance at the cost of endurance. You probably didn't need that endurance anyway.

Thx for that post, so you can answer my question then, 7 years ago on my ssd i was told to make a 20% over provision partition on my ssd, but alot of people say this is not needed these days, so i have just bought a M.2 NVMe Gen4 drive, do i need to allocate a over provision partition ? thx

 

[ThrashZone]

Thx for that post, so you can answer my question then, 7 years ago on my ssd i was told to make a 20% over provision partition on my ssd, but alot of people say this is not needed these days, so i have just bought a M.2 NVMe Gen4 drive, do i need to allocate a over provision partition ? thx

Hi,
Yes
No
Maybe so hehe
Just having unallocated space qualities.

It's pretty much what samsung magician does if a user activates over provisioning lol

 

[Daytrader]

Hi,
Yes
No
Maybe so hehe
Just having unallocated space qualities.

It's pretty much what samsung magician does if a user activates over provisioning lol

So, if i don't fill the drive up, example my 2TB, if i always leave like 400GB of free space, thats the same as over provisioning ? western digital software does not even have a option to do over provisioning like my old magician software had, thats why i am asking really, thx for reply.

 

[ThrashZone]

So, if i don't fill the drive up, example my 2TB, if i always leave like 400GB of free space, thats the same as over provisioning ? western digital software does not even have a option to do over provisioning like my old magician software had, thats why i am asking really, thx for reply.

Hi,
I only leave 200gb unallocated on a 4tb WD sn850x
Free space theirs a ton but that is free space for user files and os expansion unallocated is space for the device firmware to operate with.

 

[AsRock]

I love the quotes you've made, despite the fact i've proven them wrong here already.
Yes, SSDs fragment. Yes it slows things down. That's been proven here already and it's not disputable.


SSD's should not have a classic "full defrag" completed on them, and it seems you don't know what that means.

A full defrag is where every single file was defragmented and moved to the start of the disk for higher speeds. THAT is what SSD's do not benefit from, wasting writes.
"Quick" Defrags of just the worst files? It's already being done on your SSD automatically, this has been covered in the thread. This is just manual control over it.

What be nice is to be able to know what cells are taken up and have to ability to move data to other cells were no data as been. Like for a example a gaming drive that games just get installed and stay there for months if not longer.

As how can it be wear leveling if it only does the un-used space it's just wearing out what ever available space there is.

 

[Edwired]

What be nice is to be able to know what cells are taken up and have to ability to move data to other cells were no data as been. Like for a example a gaming drive that games just get installed and stay there for months if not longer.

As how can it be wear leveling if it only does the un-used space it's just wearing out what ever available space there is.

There is a software I use called TreeWiz it free to use that does show details on per blocks

WizTree - The Fastest Disk Space Analyzer

Official WizTree web site. WizTree is the fastest disk space analyzer available for Windows. It reads the Master File Table (MFT) directly from the disk, bypassing Windows and gaining a huge performance boost.

diskanalyzer.com

It analyse what data uses up spaces and other things as it handy to use
You could use hdsentinel for checking health as for additional functionality it would require a licence but a trial version would be efficient enough just for checking

 

[Daytrader]

Hi,
I only leave 200gb unallocated on a 4tb WD sn850x
Free space theirs a ton but that is free space for user files and os expansion unallocated is space for the device firmware to operate with.

My WD software don't allow me to over provision/unallocated, so did you do it in windows Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Administrative Tools\ Computer Management\Storage\Disk Management ?