Pro tip: Defragmenting only works on spinning drives because it puts the data nearer to the spindle so seek times are shorter. Solid-state drives wear out faster if you defragment them, since every write involves a little bit of damage.

[–] Alawami@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Random reads are still slower than sequential in SSD. try torrenting for a year on SSD, then benchmark then defragment then benchmark. it will be very measureable difference. you may need some linux filesystem like XFS as im not sure if there is a way to defrag SSDs in windows.

[–] LazerFX@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

That's because the drive was written to its limits; the defrag runs a TRIM command that safely releases and resets empty sectors. Random reads and sequential reads /on clean drives that are regularly TRIMmed/ are within random variance of each other.

Source: ran large scale data collection for a data centre when SSDs were relatively new to the company so focused a lot on it, plus lots of data from various sectors since.

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