Today I wanted to talk about a issue that I have seen on quite a few occasions regarding SSD drives. SSDs (solid state drives) do not have any moving parts. SSD drives have memory chips instead of heads and platters like traditional hard drives . These SSD’s have a certain amount of read and writes that they can do in their lifetime before they are done . It is due to this reason that SSD’s do not need to be defraged . These drives run very efficiently compared to their counterparts and they do not gain any performance boost from defragging. With that said, you won’t really harm your SSD drive should you accidentally defrag it (Drive Genius will identify that your drive is SSD and tell you that it shouldn’t be defraged). One small “plus” if you ever did defrag your SSD drive is that the files would then be contiguous, and should the drive have a logical failure, those contiguous files are much easier to recover than highly-fragmented files. But to be clear, Prosoft doesn’t recommend defragging your SSD drive since there is no performance gain.. Some people are concerned that they might hit that limit of read/writes, but in actuality you’ll probably never actually hit the SSD limit (as you’ll have likely upgraded it or moved to another computer by the time you’d have hit that limit).
Since Defrag isn’t important for SSD owners, you may wonder, “Ok, so I run SSD, so why should I be interested in Drive Genius?”— There are many other features in Drive Genius that are very important for SSD owners:
DriveSlim® – This great feature can free up space on your small SSD drive– As you know, SSD drives tend to be much smaller in capacity and MUCH more expensive.. So hard drive space is very important.. DriveSlim® becomes that much more of a feature– Find and remove duplicates, large files you don’t know about, other language support,etc.
DrivePulse® – This is an early-warning system that will alert you to drive problems (yes, SSDs can still suffer from logical failure due to corrupted directories and other problems.
Clone – Make a full device clone of your drive