Optimize and defragment Drive

[SleepingGiant]

Hi there,

 

Is optimizing/defragmenting your SSD a good idea or nah?

I remembered linus saying defragmenting your HDD will help its performance. And you should not optimize/defragmenting your SSD (due to lowering it lifespan?)

 

Anyway, i was trying to play Farcry 3 (again) in my PC. The only component i have change since playing it last was an HDD to SSD(samsung 860 evo), now i'm getting fragmentation all over the place and freezing. so i thought the SSD might be the root of the problem.

[Skiiwee29]

no need to defrag an SSD since it has no moving mechanical parts so no need to move the packets around to be in a better logical position since its instant access compared to seek time with a read head. 

[SleepingGiant]

1 minute ago, Skiiwee29 said:

no need to defrag an SSD since it has no moving mechanical parts so no need to move the packets around to be in a better logical position since its instant access compared to seek time with a read head. 

this explanation sums it up. this is what linus explained

 

but what should i do about the game being all funky and stuff? i didn't change any aside for the storage device

[Skiiwee29]

1 minute ago, SleepingGiant said:

this explanation sums it up. this is what linus explained

 

but what should i do about the game being all funky and stuff? i didn't change any aside for the storage device

sometimes copying files can cause issues. Try completely removing it and re-installing it fresh straight to the SSD. 

[SleepingGiant]

1 minute ago, Skiiwee29 said:

sometimes copying files can cause issues. Try completely removing it and re-installing it fresh straight to the SSD. 

i tried re-installing it(twice) and cleared everything related to the game

i have restarted the pc multiple times just to be sure but noting seems to work

[Skiiwee29]

Just now, SleepingGiant said:

i tried re-installing it(twice) and cleared everything related to the game

i have restarted the pc multiple times just to be sure but noting seems to work

try running a hard disc scan on it. It will require a reboot to initiate to see if there is any errors. You can also download the Samsung Magician and check the life and health of the drive as well. 

[mariushm]

SSDs should never be defragmented because that makes no sense for a SSD. 

 

A mechanical drive arranges data in small chunks (512 bytes) which are numbered sequentially and arranged in tracks, from one edge of the discs inside towards the other edge.

The most time consuming thing for hard drives is to move the read/write heads above one track on the discs and then having the heads wait until discs make a rotation and data gets under the read/write heads. So because of this, once the drive starts to read a file, it's a great idea for all the file to be in sequence, in one big block, because the drive can read it in one shot. If the file is in multiple fragments, the drive would have to jump from track to track and constantly waste time waiting nanoseconds for the disc to spin enough for the needed chunk of data to get under the read/write heads.

 

A SSD doesn't have to move heads and doesn't spin anything, it simply accesses a flash memory chip and gets data from this.

Also, SSDs work differently than hard drives in the sense that they intentionally spread the data across the memory chips to increase read/write speeds and to increase endurance of the SSD. 

With mechanical drives, the operating system can say "give me data from track 0 , sector 0, bytes 0..511" and the mechanical drive will move heads to the first track (near the edge),  then spin until data gets under the head and reads that data and returns it.

A SSD doesn't work like that... the ssd controller chip keeps in memory a list of locations so it knows when operating system askks "give me data from track 15, sector 100, bytes 2048-3076" the ssd controller knows that data is  actually on memory channel 3, flash memory chip 2, page 200 (each page being 512 KB in size) , block 10 (each block being 4096 bytes)

The next chunk of 512 bytes could be on a totally different memory chip on another memory channel.

This way when you want to read a file, the ssd controller chip can send a list of commands to each channel (typical to have 4-8 channels) and retrieve data in parallel from all memory chips.

 

Just the same, when the operating system says "write these bytes at this position" the ssd will place the data in a random location in the memory channels and just update that internal list that maintains that relationship

 

[porina]

Assuming you're running Windows 10, the tool is SSD aware and doesn't defrag those in the traditional sense. What it does do is send the TRIM command to the free areas of the SSD which can help with future writes. The OS is supposed to send TRIM on every deletion event, but it is a best effort feature so doesn't always happen, especially if there is high disk activity at the time. The "optimise" will force TRIM the free areas.

 

The symptoms described could still be disk related, for example, if the disk controller is for some reason not correctly installed or has some weird setting. If you haven't already done so, install Samsung's SSD software and see if that reports any updates you can do to help.

[SleepingGiant]

8 minutes ago, porina said:

install Samsung's SSD software and see if that reports any updates you can do to help.

@porina what software are we talking about here? is it samsung magician?

 

43 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

try running a hard disc scan on it. It will require a reboot to initiate to see if there is any errors. You can also download the Samsung Magician and check the life and health of the drive as well. 

@Skiiwee29 not sure on what should i do about this data. but i think the drive is not the problem. also will be running the disc scan later. as you said a restart is needed

[Skiiwee29]

Does it show Trim enabled?

 

[TehDwonz]

2 hours ago, SleepingGiant said:

Hi there,

 

Is optimizing/defragmenting your SSD a good idea or nah?

I remembered linus saying defragmenting your HDD will help its performance. And you should not optimize/defragmenting your SSD (due to lowering it lifespan?)

 

Anyway, i was trying to play Farcry 3 (again) in my PC. The only component i have change since playing it last was an HDD to SSD(samsung 860 evo), now i'm getting fragmentation all over the place and freezing. so i thought the SSD might be the root of the problem.

On Windows, it just runs TRIM. It's not possible to "defrag" an SSD after Windows Vista/7 using the built-in tool. So when Windows 10 says "Optimize", it means TRIM if the disk is an SSD.

Just set it to once a week, or once a month and forget about it. Only time I run it manually is if I delete a few hundred MB of data - eg, after uninstalling a large game, or program - and want to install new things right away.

[porina]

1 hour ago, SleepingGiant said:

@porina what software are we talking about here? is it samsung magician?

Probably, I don't have any supported Samsung SSDs so I don't have much experience of it. If it shows no problems, then you can at least focus elsewhere on your problem.