Storage technology is constantly evolving. One of the latest technologies is Solid State Drives (SSD) - which replaces traditional electro-mechanical parts (i.e. rotating disk platters and read/write heads) with flash memory.
The benefits of SSD storage are:
?Very fast random access times due to elimination of slow electro-mechanical components
?Low read latency times due to elimination of disk seek times
?Consistent read performance because physical location of data doesn't matter (no "fastest" part of the drive as in traditional disk drives)
?File fragmentation has negligible effect due to elimination of electro-mechanical component (seeking).
Is there a need for an SSD defrag?
While there has been much discussion around whether or not to defrag a SSD - the consensus is in. Do not defragment a SSD. In fact, you can do more harm than good by performing a defrag on a SSD.
?Unlike a hard disk drive, any write operation to SSD storage requires not one step, but two: an erase followed by the actual write.
?SSD write performance degrades over time.
?Since there is no mechanical seek time on a SSD, traditional file-based defragmentation really doesn't provide any performance benefit.
With SSD storage, the whole idea is to decrease the number of writes/updates to the SSD, so you want to be sure that any sort of optimization pass performed on the SSD does as little "shuffling" of files and data as possible.
What do you do with SSDs? Intelligent SSD Optimization.
What can provide a performance benefit is free space consolidation to eliminate free space fragmentation and consolidate partially full blocks of data. High free space fragmentation is a strong indicator that a high instance of un-TRIM'ed, or partially full blocks exists.
The new requirement for managing SSDs is a disk optimizer that identifies which drive is a SSD and which is a traditional hard drive and then performs the appropriate actions for each drive.
PerfectDisk and Benefits to SSD Storage
Raxco Software draws upon its pioneering work with free space consolidation to provide a new SSD Optimize method in PerfectDisk 12 that focuses exclusively on what matters for performance to SSDs. Intelligent analysis is performed automatically and then utilizes sophisticated free space placement algorithms to provide peak SSD performance:
?consolidate the free space on the drive without also performing a traditional file defrag.
?identify where the largest section of free space is located and consolidate the free space in that location - regardless of whether it is at the beginning, middle, or end of the disk.
By working with the beneficial properties of solid state drive technology, PerfectDisk's SSD Optimize is able to maintain SSD performance over the long term without causing additional wear on the disk.
The automatic SSD optimization method is included as a standard feature in all editions of PerfectDisk 12.
Comment