Conventional wisdom is that we should not defrag an SSD drive. The additional writes needed to accomplish the defrag shortens the drive life, and there is almost no speed benefit for data access to doing it anyway.
This has a free trial mode. The basic new idea here is that there is a new algorithm that is OK to use on an SSD, and is far more conservative than traditional defragging methods. The algorithm is called SOLID.
Try at your own risk. In my case, it took about 4 minutes to improve an SSD drive that was 11% fragmented down to under 1%.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
Interesting, I had just asked a related question on a different (Not PG) forum, as Windows is showing my SSD as been optimised on a frequent basis, and I wondered if this should be turned off or not, seems it should be left on.
Didn't someone mention Windows cleaning software from the same company in a different thread?
Windows 10 (64bit) M-Audio Fast Track Pro, Band in a Box 2025, Cubase 14, Cakewalk and far too many VST plugins that I probably don't need or will ever use
there is no speed benefit for data access to doing it anyway...
In my case, it took about 4 minutes to improve an SSD drive that was 11% fragmented down to under 1%.
I am totally ignorant but curious about SSD drives. If you knew there would be no speed benefit why even do this? You said "improve an SSD" from 11% to under 1% but why does it matter? There must be something else that I am not aware of as to why you chose to defrag??
In theory, the benefit for defragging an SSD is pretty small but real.
The delay reading data on a standard mechanical hard drive is the time for the head to move as the disk rotates, so when a file is fragmented into pieces, there is more movement and hence slower access time. While the access time on an SSD is magnitudes of order faster, it still takes longer if a large file is fragmented than if it isn't.
This is one of those things about how much effort is too much for the benefit. For anyone reading, this is really on the cutting edge and not necessary. It's for those of us who like to tweak for tweak's sake, for a little improvement, just because you can. The point of my post is, now you can. That was news to me.
Oh, and replacing your mechanical hard drives in your computer with SSD drives is the single best performance improvement you can now make in a computer.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
An SSD was the best upgrade that I ever did on my now almost ten year old computer, did it three to four years ago, boot went from an agonising almost five minutes to well under a minute or less. The way things were going, computer was almost unusable with the OS on the traditional hard drive.
Well I would have expected by now that I would get a lot more capacity with an SSD for the same price, its a multiple of two, but here's hoping things get better in that regard.
Windows 10 (64bit) M-Audio Fast Track Pro, Band in a Box 2025, Cubase 14, Cakewalk and far too many VST plugins that I probably don't need or will ever use
In theory, the benefit for defragging an SSD is pretty small but real.
The delay reading data on a standard mechanical hard drive is the time for the head to move as the disk rotates, so when a file is fragmented into pieces, there is more movement and hence slower access time. While the access time on an SSD is magnitudes of order faster, it still takes longer if a large file is fragmented than if it isn't.
This is one of those things about how much effort is too much for the benefit. For anyone reading, this is really on the cutting edge and not necessary. It's for those of us who like to tweak for tweak's sake, for a little improvement, just because you can. The point of my post is, now you can. That was news to me.
Oh, and replacing your mechanical hard drives in your computer with SSD drives is the single best performance improvement you can now make in a computer.
Hey Matt, I tried it on my main PC as I was curious. I was at 9.8% fragmented before and 0.17% after running the Solid/Quick. It took about 18 minutes on my 1 TB C:\ drive. I had chosen Solid/Complete but I guess it runs Quick first. I just stopped it when it started the Complete run as it said it would take over 4 hours just to clean that last 0.17%. Of course, I said, "NOPE!".
So bottom line is that Solid/Quick should be good enough for most folks. It also provides a nice before/after screen when it's done:
Win10Pro,i9,64GB,2TBSSD+20TBHDDs,1080TI,BIAB'24,Scarlett18i8,Montage7,Fusion 8HD,QS8,Integra7,XV5080,QSR,SC-8850,SPLAT,FL21&others,Komp.14,IK suite&others, just a guitar player-AXE FX III &FM9T, FishmanTP, MIDIGuitar2, GK2/3'sw/GI20
Larry, no, I don't notice any difference but I did not expect to. Perhaps if I were running an industrial size database or a massive number of tracks in a DAW?
Jim, it's early days but I think the answer is supposed to be Yes, it's not the same as Trim (which I do routinely). I don't have a better explanation than that at this time. Yet.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
From what I understand, TRIM does not optimize the drive. It only informs the Operating System which blocks are now available to be wipe internally. I would guess that the percent of fragmentation would remain exactly the same. If anything, it would become worse since any writes done after TRIM would scatter even more, any newly written data blocks since they would be placed in areas that have now become available.
Also from what I have read in the tech write-ups,O&O is defiantly worth investigating.
Also on a related topic, I currently have by BIAB install on my E Drive, along with quite a few music programs and a ton of data files. I am seriously thinking of adding a 250GB or a 500GB SSD into the mix and move just the BIAB install to that drive so it would be for BIAB ONLY.
Would I have to do anything before hand so as not jeopardize the activation status?
I would think not but it helps to get other opinions before I do that.
BIAB2026 Windows 10 Pro (Never Windows 11!) WA6NCB
Hmmmm. I tried it using the "SOLID" algorithm but it hung up when working on the Windows search / indexing database. I had it skip that and move on. I then opened up Defraggler and did an analysis with that. Defraggler showed there were still files that were not addressed. Also, Defraggler seems faster. But I do like the graphics in OO software.
Yea that's what I thought and the following is not a "finger pointing" exercise just my opinion (and we all know what opinions are worth) coming through.
This seems to me to be one of those "just because you can doesn't mean you should" things. But that's me.
I won't be doing this on any of my SDD's until documented and proven reasons are given for why it should be done.
Larry
Win10Pro,i9,64GB,2TBSSD+20TBHDDs,1080TI,BIAB'24,Scarlett18i8,Montage7,Fusion 8HD,QS8,Integra7,XV5080,QSR,SC-8850,SPLAT,FL21&others,Komp.14,IK suite&others, just a guitar player-AXE FX III &FM9T, FishmanTP, MIDIGuitar2, GK2/3'sw/GI20
That's fair and sensible. I did say to use it at your own risk. Or maybe I should better say, wait for more feedback on this. I just found it interesting.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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