Should you defrag an SSD?

Here's a comment from pcworld on that:

Fragging wonderful: The truth about defragging your SSD | PCWorld

The general practice is not to defrag, as that decreases the number of finite rewrites available.

Should You Defrag an SSD?

John,

For your new Samsung 840 Pro SSD you want to load the Samsung Magician application. This application advertises to do several things and I will only comment on the feature that restores performance to your drive. It is NOT a defrag (that's only useful for hard drives where heads seek less if all portions of a file are close together on the disk), but rather a performance enhancement that prepares the whole SSD to be written to.

For those that do not have Samsung drives, if your drive supports garbage collection simply leaving your machine on when it is not being used will trigger a performance improving feature that will help write performance on SSDs that have been "busy".

Jim

John,

I'm not in front of the laptop where I have this utility installed, but as I recall the Magician application does indeed start automatically but does not do a boot-time optimize (at least not on my system). You then have to click something that reads like "performance optimization" from a large button on the left-side menu, and finally press a "Start" button to refresh the whole SSD.

This does not take long; it is MUCH faster than the HD defrag equivalent.

Regards,

Jim