Do you defragment your computer?

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i miss those days of yore.

it seems counterintuitive that a jumbled solid state drive is just as [technically] functional as a defragmented solid state drive.

Let me try one of my awesome analogies:


A defragmented harddrive is like letters in a post office- nice and grouped together, a fragmented harddrive the letters are all delivered.. all over the place.


Now a conventional harddrive has to go around from house to house "reading" them all... but a solid state harddrive can read them all at once, anytime it chooses.

Like a mail delivery person with a REALLY FAST moped and a lockpick. Like 3.00x10^8 m/s fast.

I'm primarily a Linux (and budding BSD) user, so I don't really worry about fragmentation since ext* (and on BSD, UFS, as a understand) filesystems avoid the problem in the first place.

I could say the same about a lot of computer maintenance issues.

ah so the solid state drive is SO FAST that it just doesn't matter how messy its housekeeping is, it can zip around and attend to everything in less time than a hard drive needs to rotate one revolution. ah, better living through high technology. but i think i'd still try to keep a neat solid state drive with everything in its optimal place, if only just to watch the little boxes dance around. but somebody would have to make an app which would slow down the action of the boxes on that superfast SSD so the human eye could follow the action.

It's a somewhat oversimplified metaphor -- conventional hard drives are sequential-access, like a cassette or VHS tape. In order to access data at a given point on the disk, it has to physically move the reading head there, just as you have to fast-forward on a cassette/VHS tape to listen/watch a given section, and the further away the point is from the current location, the longer you have to wait.

SSD's use flash memory, which is random-access. Random-access means that the 'seek time' for a given location is effectively constant regardless of where it is, as there are no moving parts. The physical location of the data really doesn't matter and there is no 'optimal' arrangement. It's not a perfect demonstration, but DVD scene selection kind of works that way. Though the actual video and audio data is sequential on the physical DVD disk, you can arbitrarily, from any point in the movie, go to the movie's menu and select a new scene to watch in what (as far as human senses can percieve) may as well be constant time.

^^^
maybe then, for oldtimers like me, somebody [like a game designer] might come up with a baby boomer special, a faux-defragmenter game thingie that looks just like a defragmenter on an old W3.1 486 machine. just a thought. it oughta sell pretty well among a certain demographic of a certain age.

Since it's always wisest to run the OS off the SSD and keep the mechanical drive for storage, you'll always have the mechanical drive to play "defrag" with!

I suppose it's like not scratching an itch though... it's perfectly fine the way it is, but you just can't help but wanna' mess with it. Old habits n' all.

Mechanical or not, I haven't had to defrag a drive since moving to Windows 7. Then again, I never have one system long enough for the files to get too badly messed up anyway.

the last machine i defragged was a sony WXP machine vintage 2002, a few years back.

Yupp. Solid state drives basically have 0ns in access time. SSD's are "harddrives" made out of memory cells that sits on a SATA connector. Fastests regular SATA-III drives i have seen can do 550 MB/second. Those who sit on PCI-express interface can throw 13GB/s at you (!) - as a comparison: the fastests regular mechanical drives i have seen can do ~140 MB/s over IDE/SATA-I.

technology is progressing too fast for me to keep up a large part of me is still in the 90s.

Even linux filesystems can become fragmented, particularly when using a nearly full disk and new saves need to be split up in existing free space, but it is true that they are more resistant.

To check how much fragmentation an ext3 or 4 partition has you can run something like this:

First. unmount the drive to be checked.

for ext3 assuming the partition is sdb1:
fsck -nvf /dev/sdb1

for ext4 assuming the partition is sdb1
fsck.ext4 -nvf /dev/sdb1

Obviously, change the "sdb1" to the appropriate partition. "df -h" is helpful in identifying partitions. Sorry if this is rudimentary sounding -- consider it for other readers if not for you.

You'll get a report that indicates noncontiguous files and directories. That's your fragmentation level. I just checked out a 1tb drive that's 70% full: 1357 non-contiguous files (0.1%)

I'd call that excellent, but it obviously isn't "no fragmentation".

It *could* make a big difference - in theory if you have a large file, and sector 1 of that file is on the inner most track of the disk, sector 2 is on the outer most track, sector 3 is on the inner most track, and so on, reading that file would be painfully slow. A lot of disk defragmenters try to put files that are related and most likely to be used together, i.e. all the files in the same directory, adjacent to one another on the disk. In any case I had always heard that NTFS volumes are supposed to be partially defragmented automatically, but I'm not sure that's true or if it is true, to what extent.

I only defragment (hard disk) drives every few months, and even so, I fail to see any performance increases.

Maybe I'm not seeing a performance increase because perhaps defragmenting just isn't as necessary as it used to be. Technology is constantly changing; read and write rates for drives have increased and so has managing that data in an efficient manner.

Fragmentation CAN occur. There is no natural law that guarantees it.

You can also plan your harddrive partition setup to minimise fragmentation, example:

Partition 1. A system partition (Windows, Linux, whatever)
Partition 2. A swap partition (or system pagefile and %TEMP%)
Partition 3. User partition (games and stuff you rarely change)

Partition 1 will be written to as soon as you install something or patch the system. Some fragmentation may occur, but nothing that need a serious defrag.
Partition 2 will be severely fragmented fast.
Partition 3 will probably not be very fragmented at all.

My understanding is that SSDs are rated for the number of read/writes that they can handle. This is why you can see widely varrying price differences between SSDs of similar capacity. Also I think most of them are programmed to fail sectors that have are over their read/write limit. So if you defrag them your effectively reducing the capacity of the storage.