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A Closer Look:
You don't need a positronic brain to understand how SSD's work. When it comes to SSD's there are two types: SLC (Single Level Cell) and MLC (Multi-Level Cell). The PE128GS25SSDR is a MLC drive. SLC drives are faster than MLC drives, but cost significantly more. Aside from the leveling, SSD's work very similar to how USB flash drives work. In fact they both use the same NAND flash type to store data. SSD's use multiple NAND flash units to build up their capacity and to help compensate for the relatively slow nature of NAND flash storage. Due to the nature of flash storage, the drives can only be written to a certain amount of times. The drive compensates by writing to every other block on the drive before returning to the original block for rewrite. This is called wear-leveling and helps extend the life of the drive. The blessing is that the drive knows exactly when it will run out of writes to the flash storage and can warn you ahead of time that it's time to purchase a new drive. Even if you run out of writes, you should still be able to read from the drive, as you essentially have an infinite amount of reads. Rotary drives have some means of letting you know when parts are going bad, but failure is usually due to mechanical parts wearing out, which isn't always easy to predict. Even though SSD's can theoretically have a shorter life span than rotary drives, this is really dependant upon your computing habits and how often you're writing stuff to the drive. There are instances where a SSD could easily outlive a rotary drive, but it's all dependant on you. To quantify it, under fairly heavy disk usage, you'll probably get at least 5 years of use out of the average MLC SSD drive.
To Defrag Or Not To Defrag?:
The answer simply put is to not defrag. This may seem counter intuitive to everything you've been trained to do, but SSD's do not need to be defragmented. Doing so can actually reduce the life span of the drive. To understand why this is the way it is, we need to understand why we defragment a hard drive in the first place.
Standard rotary hard drives work by having spinning platters inside that contain all of the data. Rotary hard drives write from the inside of the platter outwards, the same way a DVD burner writes to a CD or DVD. When files are spread across different parts of the drive (i.e. beginning of a file on the inner portion and the remainder in the outer portion) the magnetic head that reads the data has to travel to each location to gather all the parts before the file can be whole. This costs time. Not a lot for each file, but when compounded over thousands of files in thousands of different locations, it adds up quick. Read speeds differ depending on where you are on a platter as well (faster on the inner portion than on the outer portion). Defragmenting works by grouping all of the parts of a file in a continuous place on the platter. This greatly reduces the time required for the magnetic head to gather up all of the parts, and read the file.
Solid state drives differ, in that they have no moving parts. This in turn means that it effectively takes the same amount of time to access a file no matter where it is on the drive. So a part can be spread across different portions of the drive and still have the same performance as if all the parts of the file were in a continuous area. In essence with an SSD the speed is more dependant upon the nature of the memory used in the SSD and of course the efficiency of the system bus.