I started to title this Solid State Drives and Fragmentation – ‘How things really turned out to be…’, but I thought it might draw more attention if I titled it the way I did.
You see several years ago I wrote an article comparing SATA hard disk drives and SSD solid state drives (and getting the right drive for QuickBooks). The net result was that if you could afford an adequately sized SSD to meet your file requirements it was preferable. One reason for that justification was my reliance upon the general 'state of awareness' by disk drive and software engineers at the time from which I developed a statement about SSDs and the subject of 'fragmentation.' "With Solid State Drives, neither platter spin speed (RPMs) or fragmentation are an issue. Even though data may be written to the various memory cells sporadically, this doesn't pose sufficient impact in accessing the data to even be considered as disk fragmentation, especially since data can be read so much faster from an SSD than a Hard Drive."
So, while the technical community once thought that Solid State Drive fragmentation wasn’t really an issue when we first started using SSD drives, time using the drives has proven otherwise.
It is true that Solid state drives are faster, more powerful, more efficient and typically more reliable than SATA hard drives. High-end SSDs have proven to yield very impressive read times, more than double a typical SATA hard drive. But, the problem is that while solid state drives start out fast, they quickly begin losing speed.
Another misleading factor early on in their development was based on their lack of moving parts, engineers were certain that file fragmentation wasn’t going to be an issue like it was with SATA hard disk drives. But that has proven to simply not be true. SSDs in fact experience degradation due to both file and free-space fragmentation, just like hard drives (although in different ways).
That does not mean that something can’t be done about declining performance of SSD drives, and the fragmentation on those drives. Just as engineers learned to manage declining performance and fragmentation on SATA hard disk drives, engineers have now learned how to produce software that alters the way that SSD drives behave. Condusiv, the people who were formerly Diskeeper (that developed auto-defragmentation software for SATA hard drives) are producing technologies like IntelliWrite® to prevent drive degradation, reduce data fragmentation and optimize SSD performance.
If you are experiencing issues of severe fragmentation or drive degradation involving your Solid-state Drives, especially large SSDs, you might want to check into this type of technology. Because, while even the most educated of us once thought SSDs were the answer, nobody (including myself) really had enough experience with the technology until the drives became both readily in-use and large enough in capacity, to recognize how wrong we had been about their technical differences in altering data structuring on the drives.
So yes, even 'the Mind of Murph' can be wrong.
Disclaimer - this is not 'Sponsored Content' and is not a formal endorsement for Condusiv or their IntelliWrite® technology by either the Publisher or Editor, the information is provided as a reference and intended solely as an informational resource for our readers.