If you type two spaces after a period, you're doing it wrong. (Jan 2011)

SSD DEFRAGGING (Jan 2011)

Solid State Drives (SSD) have no moving parts. SSDs are limited to a finite number of writes for each spot ont he disk. SSDs do not simply overwrite data, rather they need to clear or delete a spot and them write to it. Fragmentation doesn't reduce seek and data access time. "...When the free space is badly fragmented, the writes can see 30 to 40 percent degradation in performance..." <reference>. "...SSD is an addressable memory space and what you’re doing is you’re mapping a virtual disk onto this memory space. There’s no penalty for having a fragmented disk...." <reference>. Defragmenting causes extra wear as each data move takes multiple writes. The best practice is not to automatically defrag, and maybe rarely manually defrag. Buy SSDs with "high-endurance cells", larger cache, and the best (internal) wear-leveling algorityms. My personal preference is to use SSD for non-thrashy priority access data, and instead of defragging, backup, wipe, and restore by file copy.