Rollback Rx & SSD

I have SSD with Rollback Rx. I heard that it's not advisable to defrag the SSD.

How about Rollback Rx built-in-defrag, can I use that with my SSD?

 

Whoa, now THAT is one excellent question ... I, too, shall be awaiting any replies, not because I have either a SSD or Rollback, but because the future never knows.

Acadia

 

While I have no direct experience using RB with an SSD, you might want to checkout this thread:

http://horizondatasys-forum.com/rollback-rx/805-ssd-rollback.html

 

anybody using Rollback Rx with SSD?

did you guys use the built-in-defrag of Rollback Rx?

I'm using Rollback Rx with my SSD for almost a month now - still not using the built-in defrag of Rollback Rx.

 

The built in defrag utility found in RB Rx will only defrag the snapshots. If you defrag any drive that Rx is watching Rx will see that as new and be busy as a beaver noting the activity. It is not recommended to defrag a monitored drive using any 3rd party program while RB is installed.

 

OT, but I'm curious if anyone knows how fast regular backups (full images with Acronis, ShadowProtect, or similar) are from SSD drives, say to an external SSD drive with USB3.0 connection? Anyone here doing that?

It may seem like a weird question to ask in this particular thread, but I was hoping that when I upgrade to SSD drives one of these days I could stop using Rolllback Rx because regular and incremental backups with full imaging software would be sufficiently fast.

 

Its not the back-up speed of incrementals that (IMO) is the thing to think about especially since if you have (for example) ShadowProtect set to do an incremental every 15 min the time to do the backup is very very short, and occures without detrimental performance effect as its occuring,,,,,the key differences are A: the speed of restore, B: the availability of external media to backup to.

In other words, if you have SP on a desktop that is always connected to an external drive then there is very little to recommend Rx over SP in terms of backup speed, however restores with Rx will still be much faster. If however you do not always have an external drive available then Rx beats SP hands down,,,,,,,at least in terms of recoverability from software or OS issues. Rx is useless against hardware issues as all its snaps are on the main drive, not on an external drive. Thus, if there is a hard drive melt down the fact that you have Rx snaps does you no good at all.

It is essential that you be clear on what each type of software is designed for. RollBack is not an imaging program. It is a ROLLBACK program. Its excellent if you simply want to revert the PC in time as far as the OS and other software is concerned. But obviously it cannot revert in time if the hardware has become damaged. With an imaging program you can replace any hardware that is faulty and then restore the system from the image.

 

I just got my issue of PC World and they have a section in it called Technology's Biggest Myths. On defragmenting hard drives they say solid-state drives don't need to be defragmented. SSDs don't have a drive platter or read/write heads that need to go searching around the drive. In fact, defragmenting is generally not recommended for SSDs because it wears down the hard drive's data cells, shortening the drive's overall lifespan. it's the October 2010 issue.

 

Rollback's RX defrag, is not a defrag.
When run from inside windows the only thing it does is to unmark as read-only the sectors that no longer contain data = releases the space occupied from deleted snapshots and the space occupied from deleted files of the current snapshot.

When run from the preboot menu unmarks those sectors and verifies/optimizes its internal file system.

Panagiotis