Matty writes, "as a follow-up to yesterdays question, how long to solid state hard drives last, do I need to defragment my SSD on a regular basis, or defragment it at all?"

Because of the unique nature of solid state hard drives, fragmented data doesn't have the same impact on performance as it does with the traditional spinning disc hard drive. Let me explain:

With a traditional hard drive, your data is stored on a magnetic disc that spins - anywhere from 5,400 rotations per minute to 15,000 RPM - and the "head" of the disc - the part that reads/writes from/to the disc - simply moves back and forth. With all of these moving parts, there are physical implications of having data stored "in order" - that is, the more organized your data is, the better performance you're going to get because the hard drive doesn't need to physically move to different sections of the disc to read data.

Fragmentation occurs naturally in hard drives because data moves around a lot - every time you store a new cookie, delete an old file, or use more swap space, data needs to be moved, stored, or erased. All of that moving leaves gaps in the free space section of the hard drive, gaps which are filled by new incoming data. Eventually, the data on your hard drive ends up looking like a mess, with sectors of data for one file scattered across the disc. Defragmentation cleans that mess up in an optimal way (sometimes you need to defragment on your own, other times the operating system or file system, will take care of data organization for you).

Solid State Disks have no moving parts: everything is stored electronically. There is no disc to spin to the correct position, or head to move to the right track (boy, now that I'm typing it out, I really feel like my hard drive is an ancient cassette tape). Since there are no moving parts, there is no optimization to be had by keeping all of your data stored "in order" - the only thing defragmenting an SSD is going to do is reduce the lifespan of you disk by a few months.

Defragmenting a drive takes a lot of writing. SSD's only have a few years worth of writes in them before they eventually fail and refuse to write anything to the disk. The more writing you do, the shorter the lifespan of your SSD is going to be, plain and simple.

There you go, two reasons why you do not ever want to run a defragmentation program on a solid state hard drive: it reduces the life of the drive, and they simply do not need it.

Do you have a question you need answered? E-mail me! lordkat@gmail.com

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Be safe,

Jason