Disable Defrag for Solid State Drives

Mon, Nov 10, 2008

Technology

I recently upgraded my laptop from an Acer Ferrari 4000 to a Lenovo X300.  One of the deciding factors for me was the chance to get a laptop with a new Solid State Drive (SSD).  Reduction is power consumption, noise, and vibration was the primary interest in SSD for me.  After having it for just over three weeks I am pleased to say this is an awesome laptop.

The other day I happened to notice an article that talked about how Windows 7 would be more friendly to SSD based computers.  I thought this might be interesting so I read through the article.  I found another article that substantiated the first article.  One of the main points  that I picked up on was in regards to defragmentation of the hard drive.  Call me eccentric but I tend to defrag my drives frequently and have relied on AusLogics Disk Defrag tool to accomplish this task.  But after reading the different articles out there I won’t be defragmenting my X300 any time soon.

Turns out that SSD can read the data just as fast from a fragmented drive as an unfragmented drive.  Without any moving parts the SSD can pull the data cleanly and without having to swing the drive heads across the different platters.  Even worse, it seems that the function of defragging your drive can wear our your SSD faster due to the read/write functions happening to the SSD memory chips.

So if you own a new SSD and haven’t already done so, disable the built in Disk Degragmenter that Windows configures automatically:

 Disk Defrag Console

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