Do Solid State Disks Need Defragging?

By Alex Handy

July 15, 2008 — (Page 1 of 4)
The standard defragmentation procedures of most IT departments are not unlike the janitorial policies. A steady flow of cleaning supplies and work is required every day, while occasional mishaps require special attention. But just like the striking janitors of Silicon Valley, the defragmentation market is staring down a crisis of its own: Does the emergence of solid state disks (SSD) in servers eliminate the need for defragging?

At first glance, most experts will state that SSDs do not need to be defragged. Mike Karp, Systems Management News storage columnist, pointed out that there are two kinds of SSD and that defragmenting either is not needed.

“There is no conceivable reason to defragment either. SSDs based on RAM will not be adversely affected by defragging unless your concept of defragging involves the use of a hammer,” said Karp. “Flash-based SSDs are all also unlikely to be harmed, but there is a caveat: Because the lifetime of flash memory is typically limited by the total number of writes the memory can accept, and because defragging actually does a rewrite in the process of making data contiguous, a defragmenting procedure will shorten the life of the flash memory by lessening the number of writes that the chip can accept.”

While Karp is not alone in his view of defragging’s usefulness in SSDs, there are those who think otherwise. Most notable among the supporters of defragging SSD is Diskeeper, a Burbank, Calif.-based company that offers numerous defragmentation tools for standard hard drives and storage arrays.

Gary Quan, senior software architect at Diskeeper, acknowledged that flash-based SSDs have a lifespan, and therefore shouldn’t be defragmented as often as typical hard drives. But that’s not to say he hasn’t seen benefits from defragmentation in SSDs.

“What we found out is that fragmentation can really hurt the I/O bandwidth on SSDs. There isn’t that much of a performance degradation until the files become heavily fragmented. But there may be an increase in the number of I/O operations that have to occur. That’s not where we’re seeing the degradation. We’re seeing that during write activity. When the free space is badly fragmented, the writes can see 30 to 40 percent degradation in performance,” said Quan.

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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