Chances are pretty good most of you out there will be installing a solid state drive soon or within the next year or so. However we’ve been told for almost 18 years (MS-DOS 6 was released in 1994 which featured the DEFRAG.EXE utility) that we’re supposed to periodically "defrag" our hard drives to optimize performance.
But is this necessary on SSD?
In a word, no.
Why isn’t it necessary? Because there’s no real reason to do it, and will in fact decrease the lifespan of a solid state disk.
On platter-based drives, the "clean up" of file fragments puts data as "close together" as possible for faster file access and to decrease wear of the hard drive overall by having the platters spin less.
Being that there are no spinning platters (or anything that moves for that matter) in the way SSD works, there’s no point to defragging a solid state disk at all. In fact, if you do defrag an SSD, that causes more file writes and decreases the lifespan of the media.
Defragging SSD will also not make data accessible at any faster rate of speed; it will always remain the same.
Does this apply to other Flash-based media as well?
Yes. There is literally no reason to ever defragment any Flash-based media. USB sticks, SSD, smartphone storage, portable music players, etc. All of those do not require defragmenting of their storage media.
The general rule of thumb is this: If the storage media uses spinning platters, yes you will have to periodically defragment (unless a journalized file system like Linux uses). If the storage media is Flash-based and has no moving parts, it does not need defragmenting.
Like what you read?
If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below:
