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[–] 51 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Pro tip: Defragmenting only works on spinning drives because it puts the data nearer to the spindle so seek times are shorter. Solid-state drives wear out faster if you defragment them, since every write involves a little bit of damage.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I was about to throw hands, but then I learned something new about how SSDs store data in pre-argument research. My poor SSDs. I've been killing them.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    No you didn‘t. All somewhat current operating systems do not defrag SSDs, they just run TRIM and it does not kill them.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Most modern OSeses do defragmentation on the fly and you don't really need to do it anymore.

    Which makes me sad because I have so many memories of watching a disk defragmenter do its thing from my childhood.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Random reads are still slower than sequential in SSD. try torrenting for a year on SSD, then benchmark then defragment then benchmark. it will be very measureable difference. you may need some linux filesystem like XFS as im not sure if there is a way to defrag SSDs in windows.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    That's because the drive was written to its limits; the defrag runs a TRIM command that safely releases and resets empty sectors. Random reads and sequential reads /on clean drives that are regularly TRIMmed/ are within random variance of each other.

    Source: ran large scale data collection for a data centre when SSDs were relatively new to the company so focused a lot on it, plus lots of data from various sectors since.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    I'm pretty sure running XFS defrag will defrag without trimming no matter the type of block device.

    Edit: yea you might actually be right. I Played with my fstab too much years ago, and never thought of that untill now

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I understood that XFS automatically mounted SSD's with XFS_XFLAG_NODEFRAG set? Is this not the case?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    yea you might actually be right. I Played with my fstab too much years ago, and never thought of that until now

    But does that flag affect manually running xfs_fsr?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    According to the man(8) page, it will avoid touching any blocks that have the chattr -f flag set, which is XSR_XFLAGS_NODEFRAG... So I think if the docs are still accurate to the code, yes.

    A lot of ifs in that assumption.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    well, defragging my ssd was the only thing that let me shrink the windows partition safely when i dualbooted... tho maybe thats just windows being funky

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Defragging an SSD on a modern OS just runs a TRIM command. So probably when you wanted to shrink the windows partition, there was still a bunch of garbage data on the SSD that was "marked for deletion" but didn't fully go through the entire delete cycle of the SSD.

    So "windows being funky" was just it making you do a "defragmentation" for the purpose of trimming to prepare to partition it. But I don't really see why they don't just do a TRIM inside the partition process, instead of making you do it manually through defrag

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    i used Defraggler, after nothing else worked to allow diskmgmt to shrink it, including all the normal stuff like disabling page files, snapshots, etc. it shows me how it was reordering parts of the ssd.

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