I'm looking forward to when I perform my next upgrades, as I will be switching to SSD's from HDD's. I like a few of the advantages such as no seek times rendering the need to move your files, such as a page files, useless. But it never really occurred to me until lately I was trying to find a defragmenter that did just that, defragment, since every program seems to like doing it's "prioritizing" which is useless for SSD's. Continuing.. it occurred to me, if the SSD can access any given point in the chip with no seek time, is fragmentation even a concern any more? I'm assuming they can just access every sector containing the data at the exact same time, so compacting them seems like a useless chore. The end of defragmenting? What are your thoughts?
I don't think the technology is there yet, or cheap enough per gigabyte to replace harddrives as the main data storage device for computers (notebooks for road warriors may be good candidates, however). I note it is difficult to find a 250Gb SSD for under $500 while there are a dozen or so 1Tb - 1.5Tb hard drives for under $160. 2Tb drives for around $300. I would wait a couple years. While reads are faster, writes are not. I personally don't care if a program takes a couple seconds longer to load - I do care if it runs fine once fully loaded - and hard drive technology (coupled with an adequate supply of RAM - to minimize PF usage) is still able to do that. Well, you don't need to defrag SSD drives to improve performance. But since SSDs have a limited number of read/write cycles, and since defragging is all about moving (which is reading and writing), you should probably avoid doing it.
Bill Bright is right, you do not need to defrag SSD's, it only wears them out. Best approach is to buy a smaller SSD drive (e.g. OCZ vertex 30GB) and install your OS and programs on it. Buy a 1GB Samsung Spinpoint which has only 3 platters and incredible data condensation (meaning reading/writing more sequential data) for you Data. In this way you will have the best of both worlds OCZ SSD: fast random I/O access (170MB/sec read) for smaller files (good but not great for sequential access) Samsung Spinpoint 1TB: high streaming sequential data I/O (good, but not great at fragmented random access)
