It’s a quandary.
Solid-state/hybrid drives (SSHDs) use a modest amount of high-speed memory as a kind of front end to a large, conventional, spinning-platter drive; software makes the two act as one. The idea is to yield a drive that’s faster than a conventional drive, but less expensive than an all-solid-state drive.
But, as you state, conventional spinning-platter drives need regular defragging to maintain good speed and operational efficiency. But SSDs can actually be harmed by defragging; these drives require a different kind of maintenance, called TRIM.
Users with hybrid drives thus face a dilemma: Which of these two incompatible maintenance techniques should you use to keep an SSHD healthy and operating well?
There’s usually a way to get an answer, but it may take a little digging.
That’s because some hybrid drives use a solid state add-on as a kind of giant cache — larger but not conceptually different from the firmware caches that hard drives have had almost from the beginning. If the solid state portion of an SSHD is indeed this kind of large write-through cache, then this type of drive usually can be defragged without harm.
But if the solid-state portion is large enough to be considered a drive in its own right — especially if it gets assigned a drive letter — or if the drivers treat the solid-state portion as if it were a drive unto itself, then the rules might flip, and you should not defrag.
Alas, I know of no universal way for an end user to independently verify the best maintenance approach for any given drive.
So the best bet is to follow the manufacturer’s advice.
To pick a random example — the HP PC Seagate Solid State Hybrid Drive FAQ (site) says: “It is not necessary, nor is it recommended to run a disk defragmenter. Disk defragmentation is not necessary, and using a disk defragmenter temporarily slows the performance of the computer.“
That’s a refreshingly clear and unambiguous recommendation for users of HP/Seagate SSHDs.
I suggest all SSHD users visit the support site for their specific brand and model of drive, to see what’s recommended there. If you can find no recommendation listed, use the support site’s contact links and ask them directly: The manufacturer should know how the drive is set up internally, and what the correct maintenance should be.
And, if you follow the manufacturer’s recommendations, you’ll also be helping to preserve your drive’s warranty, in case something goes wrong.
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Or you can run Linux, we don’t need to defrag our drives.
Well, with journaling file systems, that’s mostly true — but it’s not as absolute as you may think. E.G. see:”There is a common misconception among GNU/Linux users that our systems never ever need to be defragmented….” — How to defrag your Linux system. There are many other similar resources online too.
Linux avoids many, but not all, defrag issues.
It isn’t widely known, but Windows 8+(and possibly 7) still run a limited defrag on SSD. Part of this is the necessity of keeping NTFS metadata efficiently organized, and probably legacy management of things like Superfetch. It will also re-TRIM the free space. So the best answer for hybrid(that detects as HDD) would be do nothing, or perhaps set the interval between defrag/optimization to something longer(2 months?), but not off.
I’d love to see a source.
Windows 7 was the first generally-available desktop OS with native SSD support baked in. Win8 and 10 follow suit.
The closest documentation I can find from Microsoft says that drives get treated according to their type, and that SSDs only get retrimmed:
(via https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/storage/optimize-volume?view=win10-ps)
If there’s a better, and authoritative, source, please let me know. thanks!
These should explain. I think it does mean the documentation is incomplete or misleading in many cases, but that isn’t any big surprise.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRealAndCompleteStoryDoesWindowsDefragmentYourSSD.aspx
http://www.outsidethebox.ms/why-windows-8-defragments-your-ssd-and-how-you-can-avoid-this/
Thanks! I appreciate your taking the time to post the links!
“The real and complete story – Does Windows defragment your SSD?” is from 2014, pre-Win10. The author — Scott Hanselman — works for Microsoft, which suggests he ought to have access to pretty good resources about Windows’ operation.
I can’t find an explicit date on “Why Windows 10, 8.1 and 8 defragment your SSD and how you can avoid this;” it discusses Win10, but its examples use Win8, and the screen shots show dates in 2013. It seems legit, if dated; and the author — Vadim Sterkin — appears knowledgeable; but for some reason, the site is using an unsupported top-level domain — ICANN’s whois chokes on it. Hmmm.
In any case, one of Sterkin’s main assertions is “Microsoft has confirmed SSD defrag when the system protection feature (aka system restore) is turned on, and this is by design.”
This, and the title (“Why Windows 10, 8.1 and 8 defragment your SSD and how you can avoid this”) sure make it sound like something bad is going on. But premise he’s worrying about simply doesn’t exist on most current systems: System Restore is OFF, by default, in Win10. You’d have to manually turn it on.
And when you do — when users manually enable System Restore — Hanselman says it’s not actually “defragging” that Sterkin’s seeing and worrying about.
This is all interesting, but I don’t see a real-world take-away.
1) The behavior Sterkin worries about is at least debatable as to whether it even really exists. (A Microsoft employee says he’s wrong.)
2) Even if the behavior does exist in exactly the form Sterkin says, it simply doesn’t affect the vast majority of Win10 systems.
Plus, these articles are old. If Windows was chewing up SSDs through faulty maintenance, surely we’d know about it by now.
To me, this feels a little like a “how many angels on the head of a pin” argument: not a lot of real-world application. 🙂
In any case, I’ve been using SSDs for about 5 years or so without incident, and nothing in these articles makes me think I should change why or how I’m using ’em.
This was fun to chase down — thanks again for the links!
>but for some reason, the site is using an unsupported top-level domain — ICANN’s whois chokes on it
How does that undermine technical statements about Windows? Check Windows, not domains 🙂
>these articles are old
Yet they are still technically accurate, and have always been.
>This, and the title (“Why Windows 10, 8.1 and 8 defragment your SSD and how you can avoid this”) sure make it sound like something bad is going on
The title was coined years before MSFT came up with the explanation in Scott’s blog. And still tells you what you need know.
>Hanselman says it’s not actually “defragging”
>A Microsoft employee says he’s wrong.
Actually, Scott says neither, albeit he’s making up some “intellectual defrag” terminology. It’s a regular defrag, and the PG says just that. But I understand that it’s easier to believe a MSFT employee than do your own homework.
> But premise he’s worrying about simply doesn’t exist on most current systems: System Restore is OFF, by default, in Win10. You’d have to manually turn it on.
Oh, I’m not worried about anything. I’m a bit concerned MSFT has failed to document this behavior.
On the other hand, your statement is only accurate for system partitions not exceeding 128GB, or users disabling WU and never installing MSIs. See https://support.microsoft.com/help/3209726/
>This was fun to chase down
Agreed 🙂
Hello, If an SSD or SSHD is a higher quality and uses “wear-leveling” as Seagate does, Defragmenting a solid drive will only be fragmented again as soon as the “wear-leveling” algorithm is run.
See this seagate article. I am NOT sold on SSDs and their kin.
https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/momentus-fam/momentus-xt/en-us/docs/mb618-solid-state-hybrid-drive-us.pdf
“More worryingly, SSDs have issues with data integrity and long-term durability. Like a battery, SSDs gradually lose their ability to hold a charge (retain data) with frequent use (erasures/writes). Wear leveling delays this phenomenon but fragments data and slows performance . . . and defragging to restore speed adds disk wear. ”
Thank you.
The Seagate article is labeled as a marketing document, and appears to be from 2011. A lot has changed since then; and marketing documents are designed to put a product in the best possible light.
Early SSD did have wear problems, until all major vendors started using wear-leveling, and all major OSes learned to use trim instead of defragmentation. Those issue are long-solved.
And there’s some, um, obfuscation going on in that Seagate marketing document.
Yes, wear-leveling does scatter data around an SSD, in order to ensure that the memory cells near the “front” of the array don’t get overused. In a way, you can consider that “fragmentation.”
In a mechanical drive, that matters because once the OS knows where the data is on the drive, the mechanical heads have to be swung into position, and then wait for the correct sector to rotate into position beneath the head. Those movements and wait times are individually small, but add up: Fragmented mechanical drives are perceptibly slower than unfragmented drives.
But SSDs operate at the speed of electricity — close to the speed of light. Once the OS knows the memory address, it essentially has that data right away, with no added mechanical delays. Fragmentation simply doesn’t matter at all to an SSD…
… unless it’s 2011 and you’re in the Seagate marketing department. 🙂