Help With Hardware Choices

[sunshinenbrick]

Defragmenting an SSD will reduce the read/write cycles (life of HDD), and the nature of SSD means that defragmenting does next to nothing in terms of performance... in a sense that is why they invented them!

[TheMastersSon]

As mentioned, that last part is true for TRIM-capable OS's. As for the first, MTBFs and rated R/W cycles per cell on current SSDs are much improved over older non-NAND drives, to the point where the extra wear doesn't bother me. On our systems these drives are used for relatively static storage like OS, major apps etc, and once defragged these files stay where they are (or where the SSD wants them) for many years. We don't constantly defrag and I'd never suggest anyone do so on any SSD.

[FMod]

SSD do require occasional partial defragmentation, but for a completely different reason than HDD, to compact the NTFS MFT storing file fragment locations. This operation is automatic in OS with SSD support, done in the background on demand, and completely transparent to the end user.

 

In short, manually running SSD defragmentation is a very unusual workload and a completely nonexistent one for any desktop or workstation.