I did defrag my ssd by mistake?

[charbel1011]

I have m.2 850 evo ssd samsung i always forget to turn off the automatic defragment so i did defragment it many times by mistake i just realized my mistake what's going to happen now? did i break it or anything?

[Electronics Wizardy]

It won't hurt it. De fragging just doen't really help on ssds and puts anouther write on them.

[charbel1011]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

It won't hurt it. De fragging just doen't really help on ssds and puts anouther write on them.

But i heard it makes them life shorter im worried now.

[MorganO]

Just now, charbel1011 said:

But i heard it makes them life shorter im worried now.

it will be fine

[Oshino Shinobu]

The issue with defragging an SSD is that it uses up the SSD's finite write cycles. It won't necessarily break anything, but it can shorten the life of the SSD. The issues with defragging SSDs is often over exaggerated. You don't have anything to worry about. 

[jj9987]

What operating system? Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 do not defrag - these can detect if it is an SSD or HDD and decide whether to optimize or defragment.

[rn8686]

2 minutes ago, charbel1011 said:

But i heard it makes them life shorter im worried now.

It will be fine. Its probably not great to leave it on, but its not like it will instantly kill it. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 minutes ago, charbel1011 said:

But i heard it makes them life shorter im worried now.

You got thousands of write, one or two extra won't hurt it. Your not gonna run out of writes.

[mariushm]

The default defrag application in Windows won't defragment SSD drives (often), it detects if it's SSD or not and if so, most of the times it just does a TRIM instead of actually moving data around.

See this for more details: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRealAndCompleteStoryDoesWindowsDefragmentYourSSD.aspx

 

Quote

The short answer is, yes, Windows does sometimes defragment SSDs, yes, it's important to intelligently and appropriately defrag SSDs, and yes, Windows is smart about how it treats your SSD.

The long answer is this.

Actually Scott and Vadim are both wrong. Storage Optimizer will defrag an SSD once a month if volume snapshots are enabled. This is by design and necessary due to slow volsnap copy on write performance on fragmented SSD volumes. It’s also somewhat of a misconception that fragmentation is not a problem on SSDs. If an SSD gets too fragmented you can hit maximum file fragmentation (when the metadata can’t represent any more file fragments) which will result in errors when you try to write/extend a file. Furthermore, more file fragments means more metadata to process while reading/writing a file, which can lead to slower performance.

As far as Retrim is concerned, this command should run on the schedule specified in the dfrgui UI. Retrim is necessary because of the way TRIM is processed in the file systems. Due to the varying performance of hardware responding to TRIM, TRIM is processed asynchronously by the file system. When a file is deleted or space is otherwise freed, the file system queues the trim request to be processed. To limit the peek resource usage this queue may only grow to a maximum number of trim requests. If the queue is of max size, incoming TRIM requests may be dropped. This is okay because we will periodically come through and do a Retrim with Storage Optimizer. The Retrim is done at a granularity that should avoid hitting the maximum TRIM request queue size where TRIMs are dropped.

Wow, that's awesome and dense. Let's tease it apart a little.

When he says volume snapshots or "volsnap" he means the Volume Shadow Copy system in Windows. This is used and enabled by Windows System Restore when it takes a snapshot of your system and saves it so you can rollback to a previous system state. I used this just yesterday when I install a bad driver. A bit of advanced info here - Defrag will only run on your SSD if volsnap is turned on, and volsnap is turned on by System Restore as one needs the other. You could turn off System Restore if you want, but that turns off a pretty important safety net for Windows.

 

[Senzelian]

8 minutes ago, charbel1011 said:

But i heard it makes them life shorter im worried now.

Don't worry, your SSD is fine.

By defragmenting a drive you're putting a lot of stress on it, because it has to rearrange the data.
On a harddrive it was fine, because the advantages of defragmenting it outweigh the disatvantages.

On a SSD its just the other way around.

Defragmenting a SSD is not automatically going to kill it, it's just unnessesary stress that could be avoided, which will of course shorten the lifespan, but only by a small percentage. It's like driving a car around the block to get to the bakery, which you could avoid by simply walking.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Defragging doesn't do a ton of writing. Especially if you didn't do much deleting of files.

 

Even if everything to switched around, that's perhaps what, 500GB to move data somewhere and move it back? That SSD is good for at least 200TB of writes. If that doesn't sound like much, to put in perspective, I average about 2TB/year. My SSD is going to be irrelevant long before the flash wears out completely.