Solid State Drive

[scubawaynne]

when trying to defraggle my drive a window pop's up with the warning in the image i've attached.

I've tried to google this to find out what kind of damage can be done or if there is some work around.
Any idea's about what kind of loss they're speaking of?
 

[Nergal]

Solid state drives are a limited write medium (you can only write to a cell so many times before it degrades). This in turn lessens the life of the drive as well as its "size".

Defragging is a very write intensive process.  Thus using the software on the ssd c drive would degrade the drive and lessen its life more than doing so on a traditional mechanical hard drive.

I hope this helps you understand better

[nukecad]

Newer SSD's have a longer 'write life' than the early ones, technology improves.

But it's still reducing that life if you defrag them frequently.

SSD's don't (usually) need defragmenting anyway, they have internal controls to organise the data on them to get the best life from the drive.
(Trim, garbage collection, and wear leveling, they are all done automatically by the SSD itself).

If by some chance an SSD could benefit from a defragment then Windows will recognise that and do it automatically.

So the advice is to leave SSD's alone and let them look after themselves.

[Guest johnccleaner]

To add to the above, it's actually both normal and arguably a good thing for data to be fragmented on an SSD; it has no impact on the speed of reading it, and can help improve the drive's lifespan by not constantly writing over the same section of the drive and wearing it out before other parts. (My C: solid state drive in my personal computer is currently sitting at 30% fragmentation, which would be nuts for a conventional hard drive, but is totally fine for an SSD.)

There is a reason to defragment them as Nukecad mentioned (the drive can only track a certain huge but finite number of fragments), but the procedure in Windows is both quite sufficient to this task and perhaps more importantly, not optional. So, simple enough to let it handle that.

Defraggler can optimize the drive, however, maintaining its write speed. More information here: https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045184472-Types-of-defrag-and-optimization#optimize--0-4 and an article on Defraggler with regards to SSDs can be found here: https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/204044034

By the way, performing secure overwrite tasks (such as the Drive Wiper in CCleaner) on solid-state drives is also a write intensive process and, due to the wear leveling tech in SSDs, isn't generally effective anyway. So, that is also recommended against.

[Andavari]

On 29/11/2021 at 21:50, nukecad said:

(Trim, garbage collection, and wear leveling, they are all done automatically by the SSD itself).

 

Automatic Garbage Collection and Wear Leveling is done by the SSD if it's given the proper amount of time to recover and enter a rest state. Trim is something that must be a feature built into the OS which is in turn initiated via the OS on the SSD -- that's what a few SSD manufacturer websites state when reading the documentation.

Allowing the SSD to recover and rest can help such as entering the BIOS/UEFI and letting it just sit there doing nothing for about 8 hours, which was something Crucial/Micron suggested to a customer in a reply on an online shopping site.

With modern high capacity SSDs 1TB class or larger it's been mentioned before that they will likely outlive the user if the drive is used in a normal way and not abused which wouldn't exhaust it's terabytes written and if it doesn't have any other failure like the controller going kaput.