Last week I received an email via the blog that I thought would be good to publish. Graham, a Diskeeper user from the UK asked: "I have been advised that it is wrong to defrag an SSD hard drive. So is it safe to run Diskeeper now that I have a 128Gb ssd in my computer?"
The popular theory that “there are no moving parts” does not accurately lead to the conclusion that fragmentation is not an issue. There is more behind the negative impact of fragmentation than seek time and rotational latency on electro-mechanical drives. Most SSDs suffer from free space fragmentation due to inherent NAND flash limitations. In more severe cases (likely a server issue) the OS overhead from fragmentation is impacted as well.
As always, the “proof is in the pudding”. Tests conclusively show you can regain lost performance by optimizing the file system (in Windows). We have run and published numerous tests (and here -done with Microsoft), but so have many in various tech forums (if you would prefer independent reviews).
In short, it is advisable to run an occasional consolidation of free space. The frequency you would want to run this depends on how active (writing and deleting files) the system using the SSD is. It also depends on the SSD. A latest gen 128GB SSD from a reputable vendor is going to be all-around better than a 16-32GB SSD from 2-3 years ago.
The HyperFast product (a $10 add–on to Diskeeper) is designed to consolidate free space when it is needed, without “over” doing it. HyperFast is unique as you do not ever need to manually analyze or manually run, or even schedule it. It is smart enough to automatically know what to do and when. A common concern is that defragmentation can wear out an SSD. While that is unlikely unless it is a poorly written defragmenter, the general premise is correct, and is also something HyperFast takes into consideration by design.
Abov pic: You can always add HyperFast anytime after your purchase of Diskeeper.
More reading:
Here are a few blogs we have done on SSDs.
While a bit dated, here is one product review.