This Post is in addition to a support email I have sent.
First I'd like to thank Piriform for providing such useful software, it is developers like Piriform that make the IT world that much better!
Second, to the issue. I'm writing in concern of Defraggler not correctly identifying Solid State Drives (SSD) and consequently allowing defragmentation of an SSD. Those that are familiar with how SSD function know that it is improper to defragment an SSD for many reasons; two of which quickly come to mind. First that an SSD utilizes "wear leveling"; a byproduct of this being that sectors are reported differently than a platter hard disk, causing analysis to indicate false fragmentation. A second and very important reason being that defragmentation adds substantial unnecessary wear to the flash cells, which have a limited read-write lifetime. Therefore I strongly appeal the Defraggler team to correct this issue as I believe there are many users who defragment all of their drives, unaware of the damaging effects it has on their SSD.
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the Dev Team are aware of this mis-reporting issue of DF and from the last update on this topic (a few months ago now) there are plans afoot.
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They have been aware of this for a ridiculously long time and as yet have done nothing. Time and time again Users bring this up and SFA is the answer.
Time someone in charge of this company started looking around for replacements for members of the so-called "Dev Team" or should that be "No Dev Team" ?
Doesn't inspire great confidence in a product when it can't even properly identify the type of drive it is about to perform some serious defragmentation on !
Official word from the Admin Team is "Many changes have been made for the SSD detection recently and they will continue to improve the accuracy of disk detection in future releases."
Seems like the Defraggler Admin Team are the only utility writers who don't know how to identify a SSD drive versus a HDD or appreciate that it should be on top of their priority list and before "buy donuts for morning tea". No other utility makers seem to have this problem.
I await the update. It has only been four and a half years so far !
This seems like a prime example of Moravec’s paradox. We know that the drive is an SSD but the machine has a devil of a time trying to find out.
I don’t know how Defraggler determines the drive type, but going on Piriform’s track record it will use a legit Windows function. In other words, it asks Windows instead of trying to do it itself. As far as I can find out this is done by running some benchmark, such as random read timings. (on the other hand I think that Speccy reads the disk model number for info.) You can see what Windows thinks your drive is by running msinfo32, and reset it if required with winsat.diskformal (all at your own risk).
I was looking at the individual products in preparation of possibly buying the set. Ccleaner, Defraggler, Recuva and Speccy.
The Microsoft's defragmentation tool can see the difference of an HDD and a SSD and does not try to do a conventional defragmentation to an SSD. Why can't Piriform's Defraggler be as well built? With them not fixing this issue and allowing one of their products to actually do harm to my hardware by prematurely wearing out my SSD drives, I don't think I will be buying any of their products.
- Defraggler hasn't been updated for a long time. I am wondering whether there will be a new version of the program any time soon. But the program still contains some other bugs as well.