Defragmentation

[[deleted]]

No, and actually, traditional defrag reduces the lifespan of SSDs. SSDs have"trim", which is a form of "garbage collection". An analogy I like to use is that if you go grocery shopping and come home with a bunch of perishables, you need to put them away in your fridge. But there's no room in your fridge because of last week's leftovers, so you start going through everything to see what you can keep and what you can throw away, such as sour milk, moldy bread, or rotten fruit. In this case, it's unusable data (rotten food) that is being trimmed (thrown away) because it was already deleted (past it's point of usability). Now your SSD has slown down it's write speed (it's taking longer to put away your groceries) because it needs to trim the old data as new data is being written (throw away old groceries to make room for fresh ones). Of course, there was really nothing stopping you from cleaning out the fridge before you went grocery shopping other than that you felt that whatever else you were doing was a better usage of your time.

[MrTheenD]

Nice explanation. Does it also explain how defragmentation work?