• Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • vocornflakes@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I was about to throw hands, but then I learned something new about how SSDs store data in pre-argument research. My poor SSDs. I’ve been killing them.

    • lud@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      Pro tip: That tip has been obsolete for a long time now. Running the defragmentation tool on an SSD in Windows optimizes the drive (pretty much just running TRIM). It’s not possible to defragment an SSD in Windows (maybe there is a way using some register hack but that’s out of scope)

    • TheKMAP@lemmynsfw.com
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      5 months ago

      Defragging is about… defragging: making the data contiguous (a continuous stream along one arc of the same radius) so it doesn’t have to jump around.

    • lseif@sopuli.xyz
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      5 months ago

      well, defragging my ssd was the only thing that let me shrink the windows partition safely when i dualbooted… tho maybe thats just windows being funky

      • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        That kinda makes sense. Putting all the partition sectors together would probably make it easier to resize. But as standard maintenance it’s like changing the oil on an electric car.

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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        5 months ago

        You just don’t want to do it regularly. It was an issue for a brief time when SSDs were new, but modern operating systems are smart enough to exclude SSDs from scheduled defrags.

      • RonSijm@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        Defragging an SSD on a modern OS just runs a TRIM command. So probably when you wanted to shrink the windows partition, there was still a bunch of garbage data on the SSD that was “marked for deletion” but didn’t fully go through the entire delete cycle of the SSD.

        So “windows being funky” was just it making you do a “defragmentation” for the purpose of trimming to prepare to partition it. But I don’t really see why they don’t just do a TRIM inside the partition process, instead of making you do it manually through defrag

        • lseif@sopuli.xyz
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          5 months ago

          i used Defraggler, after nothing else worked to allow diskmgmt to shrink it, including all the normal stuff like disabling page files, snapshots, etc. it shows me how it was reordering parts of the ssd.