Are you planning to buy a Crucial 250GB SSD? Can you defragment your SSD?
The more organized you are, the better your working efficiency is. You can easily catch up on tasks and finish your day without wasting too much time. However, it is only sometimes possible to plan all your tasks simultaneously, requiring you to draw up a new plan occasionally.
The same goes for your hard drive’s data defragmentation. Traditionally, you must reorganize or defrag the data of your hard disk to keep up its working efficiency because of its structure. However, the same is voted against when concerning your SSDs. If you want to understand why, keep reading.
Defining Defragmentation
To save your data, conventional hard disks look for space present on the disk and write the data on magnetic platters. Preferably, they use consecutive platters to store the file systematically. However, this becomes difficult as the data increases, causing fragmentation of the larger files.
Given the hard drives built, this is the usual way of storing data. However, the increased data fragmentation causes the storage drive to slow down. To deal with this, you must follow defragmentation to reorganize the drive and maintain its pace and productivity.
Following this process, you can easily organize the files to avoid data fragmentation. However, if the hard drive’s condition does not support it, you should avoid defragmentation. You can instead buy Crucial 256GB SSD. However, you should know that you cannot defragment an SSD.
Why Shouldn’t You Defrag An SSD?
If you own an SSD or want to buy one, it is essential to know that you must avoid defragging them. The way SSDs organize their information is entirely different from hard drives. Unlike hard drives that write the fragmented data on magnetic platters, SSDs use electronic platters.
As a result, the massive data stored on a solid-state drive is not split, causing defragmentation to be pointless. The design of an SSD ensures no data file splits into different parts but stores the files as one. Therefore, there is no requirement to reorganize well-organized information.
So, what happens if you try to defrag your solid-state drives? When you defragment an SSD, it causes your drive’s electrical components to wear and tear. Instead of benefitting from the defragmentation process, it may be detrimental to your solid-state drive’s performance.
Additionally, this causes the lifespan of your device to decrease and makes them less reliable. Therefore, instead of defragmenting your SSD, the TRIM command can help scan and trim away any data chunks that are fallen into disuse.
For the performance efficiency of your SSD, you can employ TRIM. These types of drives feature a garbage collection feature for erasing all useless data. To streamline this process, TRIM marks obsolete files beforehand and notifies the system.
Conclusion
Because of the hard drives’ design, they generally split the data to store large data files into magnetic platters. However, where the fragmentation process causes you to save more data, it also slows the drive. For this purpose, it is necessary to defragment your data.
However, the same is not the case with SSDs, which save the data files in sequential order. Therefore, defragging these drives can cause them to wear out, decrease their lifespan, and damage their performance.