Should you defrag SSD and Hard Drives with a vary low level tool Spinrite
- Thread starter ZZLEE
- Start date
moocow
Well-known member
I thought defrag-ing a SSD applies wear on the memory chips.
He says yes it causes wear but the use case is to recover space and preference of the SSD . He says if you have a newer drive that Trim would likely take care of the drive . Fore Hard drives this looks like a very interesting tool . 
LaughingCrow
Well-known member
I used it a long time ago and it did recover data on 2 old hard drives that I was having trouble with.He says yes it causes wear but the use case is to recover space and preference of the SSD . He says if you have a newer drive that Trim would likely take care of the drive . Fore Hard drives this looks like a very interesting tool .
Haven't had any need to try it out recently. I do have 1 old 1 gig HD that's got a lot of bad sectors, but I was able to copy everything over to a SSD. It is written in machine language and a very tiny program. When I first got it, I didn't think I had downloaded the whole program it's so small. I've used some of his other utilities but that was quite a while ago.
Valkyrie
Well-known member
This was very interesting. This shows the slowdowns when the ECC kicks in on SSD's. He recommends occasional, like once a year, freshen up.
https://www.grc.com/intro.htm
https://www.grc.com/intro.htm
Shadowmeph
Well-known member
Every website that I checked not one of them said to defrag SSD they said use optimize but do not defrag
Valkyrie
Well-known member
In this case it's not defragging, which implies moving blocks around, but just refreshing the state of existing written blocks. Steve Gibson's video show's it quite well and Dave's video also explains it. The degradation of charge state in NAND cells over time will cause slowdown in read access due to ECC activity.
He's only advocating yearly refreshes of written blocks for SSD's.
Marzipan
Well-known member
how long has it been since an SSD didn't come with TRIM? it's been a decade or more now at least...this guy is living like its 2010!He says yes it causes wear but the use case is to recover space and preference of the SSD . He says if you have a newer drive that Trim would likely take care of the drive . Fore Hard drives this looks like a very interesting tool .
Valkyrie
Well-known member
TRIM has nothing to do with this. We are talking about full or near full blocks of data that were written, and only read back since. They do lose integrity over time, and lots of good research shows this. It's worth a P/E cycle to refresh them occasionally. These particular Nand cells have lots of P/E cycles left in them.
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ill test this in the test bench it has a optane 905p if it dies i know not to touch it since if it can kill a Optane drive consumer drives dont stand a chance.
