Should You Defrag an SSD? — Just Life Trends

Just Life Trends
2 min readFeb 19, 2022

If you’ve ever possessed a traditional hard disc, you’ve almost certainly defragmented it at some point. This is because the way a hard drive is constructed necessitates defragmentation. Due to the outstanding technology and additional benefits, many individuals have started replacing their HDD with an SSD in recent years. Those who are accustomed to defragging their hard drives may wonder if defragging an SSD is required.

Should I defrag my SSD?

The simple answer is that an SSD does not require defragmentation.

To explain why, we must first consider the goal of defragmenting a hard drive. Defragging ensures that huge files are stored in a single continuous section of a hard disc drive, allowing them to be read all at once. Mechanical drives have a seek time of about 15 milliseconds, so each time a file gets fragmented, you lose 15 milliseconds looking for the next one. When viewing a number of different files that are split into a lot of distinct fragments, this adds up quickly.

SSDs, on the other hand, have a seek time of around 0.1ms, therefore this isn’t an issue. You won’t feel the performance benefit of defragmented files, which means there isn’t one.

To summarise, an SSD should not be defragmented.

The answer is straightforward: do not defragment a solid-state drive. At best, it will do nothing; at worst, it will waste write cycles while doing nothing for your performance. It won’t give you any problems or ruin your SSD if you’ve performed it a few times. You don’t want it to be a scheduled, weekly task that depletes the limited amount of SSD rewrites. There are various ways to speed up your computer and clean it up. There are even reasons to format an SSD, encrypt SSDs, and find ways to expand an SSD’s storage capacity. There’s no reason to defrag an SSD as they all serve a purpose.

like to read more? Read how to hide system partition — https://justlifetrends.com/2022/02/18/hide-system-reserved-partition/

Image credits — :
Photo by Samsung Memory on Unsplash

Originally published at https://justlifetrends.com on February 19, 2022.

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