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.

[–] vocornflakes@lemmy.world 23 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Kenny@feddit.de 19 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 20 points 4 months 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.

[–] greybeard@lemmy.one 18 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Here's a little game I made because I missed it too. https://dbeta.com/games/webdefragger/

[–] indepndnt@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That was super cool.

[–] greybeard@lemmy.one 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Thanks. It was a silly toy, but it scratched an itch, and was good for at least one chuckle.

[–] Kenny@feddit.de 5 points 4 months ago

I loved watching disk defragmenter doing it‘s job as a kid. I miss it too!

[–] AllHailTheSheep@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago

real actually. definitely one of the most memorable progress bars. well, that and the bios update progress bar

[–] Alawami@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] LazerFX@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Alawami@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] LazerFX@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Alawami@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] LazerFX@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 months 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.

[–] lud@lemm.ee 5 points 4 months ago

Pro tip: That tip has been obsolete for a long time now. Running the defragmentation tool on an SSD in Windows optimizes the drive (pretty much just running TRIM). It's not possible to defragment an SSD in Windows (maybe there is a way using some register hack but that's out of scope)

[–] TheKMAP@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 4 months ago

Defragging is about.... defragging: making the data contiguous (a continuous stream along one arc of the same radius) so it doesn't have to jump around.

[–] lseif@sopuli.xyz 3 points 4 months 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

[–] RonSijm@programming.dev 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] lseif@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 months 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.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That kinda makes sense. Putting all the partition sectors together would probably make it easier to resize. But as standard maintenance it's like changing the oil on an electric car.

[–] lseif@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 months ago

i see

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 4 points 4 months ago

You just don't want to do it regularly. It was an issue for a brief time when SSDs were new, but modern operating systems are smart enough to exclude SSDs from scheduled defrags.