Question on laptop defrag

Nonazoona

Hello everyone,
I've been doing some learning and read about not needing to (or even avoiding) defrag your laptop. More specifically, not defraging your SSD. After this bit of info I found that windows sets up an auto-defrag on all systems. I looked in my laptop and found it to be defraging my SSD every week.

So here is the question: would it be wise for me to turn off the auto-defrag on the laptop (and all laptops I work on) as to save the life of the SSD?

I've been searching google for an answer and haven't found a solid one yet, just a bunch of yes I should do that, or no windows has it on for a reason.

Any advise will help, thank you!

yoba222

I avoid Windows as much as possible. Here's what part of the Linux manpage for fstrim says:

Running fstrim frequently, or even using mount -o discard, might negatively affect the lifetime of
poor-quality SSD devices. For most desktop and server systems the sufficient trimming frequency is
once a week. Note that not all devices support a queued trim, so each trim command incurs a perfor‐
mance penalty on whatever else might be trying to use the disk at the time.

stryder144

You can successfully turn off defragmentation in Windows if you are using an SSD. The only reason why defragmentation is necessary is because of the indiscriminate way that Windows places files in storage (based off of the next available block). SSDs don't have spinning disks that require a physical movement of the read/write heads. An SSD merely finds the data at very fast speeds (the speed of electricity through a solid state memory cell) without the overhead of a spinning disk and read/write heads that have to "hunt and peck" for all of the blocks of data being addressed. While Windows is still indiscriminate with where they place files on an SSD, the performance hit is considerably lower. Add to that the fact that each memory cell in an SSD has a finite number of writes, and that defragmentation involves a lot of writing to disk, then you can see why it is better to turn it off.

UncleB

Nonazoona wrote: »

would it be wise for me to turn off the auto-defrag on the laptop (and all laptops I work on) as to save the life of the SSD?

Unless you have a really old or cheap SSD then you are unlikely to come close to doing damage to it through this sort of thing. Have a read at:
The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead - The Tech Report - Page 1

The writes were into the hundreds of Terrabytes before the disks showed signs of deterioration and in a few cases, Petabytes - you are unlikely to hit that level unless you have a serious downloading addiction and an incredible internet connection.

The chances are you will decide to upgrade the disk because it becomes too small long before you run into issues of wear.

NetworkingStudent

Nonazoona wrote: »

Hello everyone,
I've been doing some learning and read about not needing to (or even avoiding) defrag your laptop. More specifically, not defraging your SSD. After this bit of info I found that windows sets up an auto-defrag on all systems. I looked in my laptop and found it to be defraging my SSD every week.

So here is the question: would it be wise for me to turn off the auto-defrag on the laptop (and all laptops I work on) as to save the life of the SSD?

I've been searching google for an answer and haven't found a solid one yet, just a bunch of yes I should do that, or no windows has it on for a reason.

Any advise will help, thank you!

https://www.howtogeek.com/97723/htg-explains-do-you-really-need-to-defrag-your-pc/

Wrapping Up

Didn’t feel like reading the whole article? Skipped down to here for some unknown reason? Here’s the quick version:

(Fastest) Windows with an SSD Drive: Don’t Defrag.
Windows 7, 8, or Vista: It’s automatic, don’t bother. (check to make sure the schedule is running)
Windows XP: You should upgrade. Also, you should setup defrag on a schedule.