Originally Posted by
Loose rivets
I'm not at all clear what goes on in a solid state drive. I had wondered if controlling switching would take a greater time if it had to go to a relatively distant array of switches - millions of times.
The thing is, the SSD moves blocks around dynamically to spread the wear across the disk. On a hard drive, if the operating system writes to block 1, it's almost certain to write to block 1 on the physical disk, unless that block has failed and the disk reallocated a spare block to replace it. On an SSD, writing to block 1 may write to physical block 1 in the flash RAM the first time, and then to block 23,956,565 the second time because that block hasn't previously been written to.
So there's no real benefit to defragging--it may well end up making the SSD
more fragmented at the flash RAM level--and significant downsides.