ssd drive?

About: "However, even on SSDs there is a practical limit on how much fragmentation certain file systems can sustain; once that limit is reached, subsequent file allocations fail. As such, defragmentation may still be necessary, although to a lesser degree."
In such a case, you don't need to perform a full defragmentation. You only need to consolidate free space. That is, make the free space on the drive contiguous.

Electro
December 2015

thanks to everyone for your help.

CV
December 2015

Yes of course - you defrag a regular Winchester drive because the files become fragmented - requiring extra head movement and disk rotation to read them. Sometimes multiple operations. With a solid state drive there is no head movement and consequently no wasted time.

A regular drive takes average seek time plus half the time of rotation to get to the next spot on the disk - a solid state drive does not have this drawback - no moving parts.

However... Wikipedia says...

There is limited benefit to reading data sequentially (beyond typical FS block sizes, say 4 KB), making fragmentation negligible for SSDs. Defragmentation would cause wear by making additional writes of the NAND flash cells, which have a limited cycle life. However, even on SSDs there is a practical limit on how much fragmentation certain file systems can sustain; once that limit is reached, subsequent file allocations fail. As such, defragmentation may still be necessary, although to a lesser degree.

generally No defrag required
December 2015

You are correct. It is best not to defrag an SSD.

Kyle
December 2015

http://helpdeskgeek.com/featured-posts/should-you-defrag-an-ssd/

XXX
December 2015