Do Solid State Disks Need Defragging?

By Alex Handy

July 15, 2008 — (Page 2 of 4)
“[Let’s say that] files that are on a hard disk drive are in 10 fragments. On an SSD, you leave it alone because if you start moving that file, it’ll decrease the lifetime of the drive. On the free-space side, we have to be smarter about how we defrag that, but we want to take into consideration the lifespan of these SSDs. Files that aren’t getting accessed very often ... we want to put them in a location that’s more advantageous for the SSD. There are several things we’re implementing. There’s something on the write I/O bandwidth that’s occurring there. We’ve been talking with some I/O manufacturers and they seem to understand this,” said Quan. Diskeeper is currently working on new software specifically designed for defragmenting SSDs.

Why Defrag?
Quan’s assurances that SSDs need to be defragmented, even with the caveat that it’s the free space that necessitates the practice, is not a popular one. Hal Woods, distinguished technologist in Hewlett-Packard’s Storage Platforms Group Chief Technologist Office, isn’t sure that defragging SSD helps.

“The question is help what? SSDs deploy techniques called 'wear leveling' that will optimize the way data is stored into the flash memory to help improve performance and spread the data more evenly across the underlying flash memory to prevent (or at least delay) the wear-out,” said Woods. “Because SSDs do not have the motors, heads and bearings of an HDD or the related access delays associated with moving the heads and waiting for the data to come under the head to access data—the problem that the defragging is supposed to solve—is not present. In all likelihood, defragging an SSD will not help the SSD to perform better or last longer and it could be the case that the defrag process, if run often enough, will do enough writes to the SSD to somewhat shorten the life of the SSD. Because there are a number of vendors, each with their own wear-leveling approaches, a given SSD may get slightly worse or slightly better performance or endurance from defragging.”

Related Search Term(s): Storage hardware, Diskeeper, Sun

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Do Solid State Disks Need Defragging?

By Alex Handy

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