Defragmenting SSD?

Krelian

I recently had some trouble with my computer, so I spent a whole week in front of it, trying to get it in working condition again. The problems were SEEMINGLY unrelated and random, but it was like you had to fight with almost every single program that you install on your computer to get em working again.

Anyways, after a whole week's of battle , it seems that I have finally won (hopefully) but during that week I had to do a FRESH REINSTALL of windows at least 4 TIMES.

And after  each single process of FORMATTING-REINSTALLING (never reinstalled  a fresh windows without completly formatting all the disk drives first)

......now it seems that my disks are working slower.

Despite it being a fresh and fully updated version of windows (yeah, really, windows update and all the updates for my computer Components such as Gfx, soundcard, DirectX ETC are there)

windows starts kinda slower than ever (althogh still not that bad, just slower than usualy, ''not actually slow'' BUT THE GAMES ALSO SEEM TO BE TAKING LONGER THAN USUAL TO LOAD, and this once is actually noticable with most any games I tried now.

PLUS, some programs take longer to initialize than what they used to, despite it being a fresh and updated install of windows.

 

SO I thought of defragmenting my disks to make it faster, even if doesnt help, it cant hurt, right?

But OOOOPS! My system is installed on the C: drive, which unsurprisingly also happens to be an SSD drive,

and after GOOGLing it, it appears that defragmenting that SSD drive is not only NOT RECOMMENDED, but also even can be dangerous to my SSD.

 

So, I ask you guys, should I defragment my SSD? IF NOT, what other alternatives are there to defragmenting an SSD (WITHOUT this leading me to reinstalling windows one more time) ?

Thank you for any possible kind of advice,

Cheers!

PS! Here are my system specs:

Windows 8

I7 3930

x2 Geforce GTX 690 (4 old 680 cards in total)

Asus Xonar Phoebus Soundcard

32GB Ram

500Gig SSD

3 TB Harddisk

 

 

Krelian

PS!

Lol, im trying to run the defrag command, but it immediately shuts itself down...

Mondo80

Where did you get a 500GB SSD?   That aside you could get a different SSD just in case the current one you have is bugged.  My SSD is used for just my OS (WIN 7 64).

mcrippins

LOL! My man you are NEVER supposed to defrag an SSD. Also there are no 'discs' in an SSD. No mechanical parts. I mean no disrespect, but i'm having a hard time understanding your actual problem. You say there are issues with installations of your games. Can you be more specific? Do you get errors? A place to start perhaps:

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/279010-32-programs-installing

 

http://www.techhelpfox.com/11005010/Win7-Wont-Install-Onto-Ssd-Correctly

rutaq

You shouldn't defragment an SSD disk.

 

Traditional harddrives use a spinning platter, like an old style record.   Data is stored on the surface of a platter in sectorsand tracks. Tracks are concentric circles, and sectors are pie-shaped wedges on a track.   To access the data there is a little arm that extends out over platter that has a read/wrtie head on the end.   When the blocks of data for a file on your computer gets fragment , it means they are scatter all over the platter so to retrieve them the read/write head has to bounce around wait for locations to swing by as the platter spins.   Defragmenting puts all related blocks of file data next to each other so the read head can read them one after another without having to bounce around.

 

SSD disk don't using anything that spins, it is made up of a gazillion interconnect blocks of NAND based memory.  For simplicity sake image each block of memory is connected to every other one, so as your file is written to the SSD drive it doesn't matter which blocks are used since there is no delay reading data from one block to the next.  So defragmenting your SSD and forcing it to put your file data in sequential blocks doesn't make it faster to retrieve your data.

 

Also SSD NAND memory wears out the more it is used, so any extra reading / writing will make it wear out quicker and defragmenting causes a HUGE amount of reading and Writing.

Tsuru

The first thing you should always check is the Power supply. Then if thats working, the RAM. If the RAM is bad, it can cause all kinds of random non related problems.

Gedias

As stated above, don't ever defrag an SSD, it only wears it down quicker.  Most newer SSD's come with their own form of defragmentation called TRIM (I assume your SSD is relatively new since it's 500GB) and most of the time this will be enabled in Windows 8 automatically or if you bought your PC from a manufacturer.   But if you installed the SSD yourself then I would double check to make sure trim is enabled by following these instructions:  http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/latest-buzz/windows-8-optimize-drives-sets-automated-trim-for-ssd-health-comfort/

 A lot of manufacturers also have programs like Samsung SSD Magician that will optimize your OS and SSD for performance, and you can also run performance tests to see if your SSD is deteriorating over time.  So I'd check with your manufacturer and download the appropriate program.

It's quite possible that your performance drop has nothing to do with your SSD but is due to all the extra programs you have installed on your operating system.  You could try removing programs from startup - type msconfig in search in the start menu, run msconfig and in the startup tab click on the programs you don't need or use often.  Or you could just uninstall them.  This should help reduce boot times.  You could also try a registry cleaner - I've never used one but I've heard they can help.

 

Ridelynn

Are your games on the 3TB HDD?

That you should defragment. The SSD - Win8 will try to "optimize" it, which consists of running the TRIM command (that you've seen mentioned here), but it won't actually try to defrag an SSD.

Make sure you have all your motherboard drivers - those often include SATA drivers that can really help disk performance, even though everything will often run without them.

Quizzical

As others have said, you shouldn't defragment an SSD.  Defragmentation is meant to mitigate a problem intrinsic to hard drives--and one that SSDs don't really suffer from.  What may be happening is that Windows starts to defragment, detects that it is an SSD, and immediately stops.  While it's not actually true that SSDs can't gain any speed benefit from defragmentation at all, the difference is the sort of thing that you'd only notice in synthetic benchmarks and not in actual game loading times.

As others have said, I'd suspect that the problem is elsewhere.  As Ridelynn points out, the speed of an SSD only benefits things that you are loading from the SSD.

Reckloose

So, since I read anything, lets see if I can help:

-CAN you defragment an SSD? Yes. Should you? No

So, since the defragger crashes, something is definetely wrong. The first thing I would try, is to run a chkdsk against the SSD, and let it fix errors if need be. Hopefully, it would be something that simple, and everything will be groovy afterwards. I'm guessing there's more going on though.

If you have an OCZ SSD, you might need to do a bios update to the drive, but you will have to reinstall afterwards (and you'll need to do the update on another computer).

I've found the optimal windows 8.1 load process to work like thus:

-If your system is UEFI capable, flip everything to UEFI (if not, oh well)

-Boot UEFI to the windows install disc (if not UEFI, then legacy)

-When you get to the point where you see drives and partitions, check the ID of your SSD. It should be ID 0, if it isn't, then windows might be placing the boot sector on your spindle, which causes strange stuff. The way to fix this (or to make sure it isn't occuring) is to unplug all drives but your intended boot drive for the install of windows.

-At the partitions (assuming SSD is ID 0, or the only drive) delete all partitions from the drive. Create a new single partition, and allows windows to set up the additional partitions (under legacy, there will be 1 additional partition, under UEFI there are 3 additionals).

-Install on the partition for windows (the others are for specific purposes).

-If you unplugged other drives, it is safe to put them back once the install is finished.

-Driver load!

-And done.

 

If you didn't delete partitions when you reloaded, I would advise you to reinstall again (I know it's a pain).

Iselin

Hmm... i just thought of something... do you by any chance have a Haswell on a Z87 board and your SSD is an OCZ Vertex 2?

 

There's an incompatibility with the controller on those SSDs and OCZ thinks it's unlikely it will ever be fixed:  http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?111964-Vertex-2-Agility-2-and-Haswell

 

Vertex 1 and Vertex 3 work fine. It's a problem with the Sandforce controller on those SSDs.

Krelian

Thank you for all your replies

Thanks to your suggestions, some hard work, and some luck, most of my problems are solved now.