SSD Defrag and Optimisation

SSD Defragmentation.

You don’t need to or be allowed to defragment a  solid-state hard drive  running Windows, Linux or MacOS X.

Hard Disk Drive File Storage.

Files on a computer system are stored as blocks typically  1KB to 2KB in size. FAT32 on Windows, for example, uses file blocks called “fragments” that are between 2 KB and 32 KB. To store a 1MB file with 2KB blocks or fragments therefore requires a chain of around 500 blocks. Each block includes the address of the next block in the chain. If any block is  corrupted then an  entire file is affected.

With a brand new hard drive, these blocks are contiguous and offer maximal performance; with a mechanical hard disk drive, As you use the disk, files are created, chained, deleted, resized, expanded, contracted, copied, etc. Pretty soon that sequence becomes far more convoluted,  With a mechanical drive, this can become inefficient as the drive keeps waiting and waiting for the next block in a file to be available to read.

To solve that problem on a standard drive, there are  defrag, utilities that will find the most fragmented files on your system and fix them. It does this neat trick by copying the file into a new chain that has lots of adjacent blocks. Then the old highly fragmented version is deleted, everything looks 100% identical, but it’s faster.

SSD Optimisation

To extend the lifespan, most SSDs use a wear-balancing  algorithm. An SSD will slow down as its use  approaches capacity.  To improve performance leave at least 25% of available space free.

SSDs will not defrag in Windows 10/8. You may see  optimization is needed, which is different from than defragmentation. Windows uses something called a TRIM command on a schedule to perform a cleanup to delete the blocks which are no longer in use.

Unresponsive SSD

Datlabs are experts at resolving SSD.s that have become unresponsive. For details see Datlabs  SSD data recovery page.