My computer has an SSD drive. Do I need to defrag it?

Q  I have an Asus Eee PC S101 with an solid-state drive (SSD). I have read that it is not advisable to defragment this type of storage device, as it reduces the life of the drive significantly.

Is this true and, if so, is there an alternative to defragmentation?
John James

A  This question is cropping up more frequently, as more laptop computers are sold with SSDs rather than traditional hard disks.

As noted before on these pages, Windows splits files into their constituent parts and saves them to the first blank area of a disk it finds. Defragmenting a traditional hard disk gathers the scattered constituent parts of files so that they all sit together.

Hard disks contain one or more spinning magnetic discs (‘platters’) and, as files become more fragmented, it takes longer for the read/write head (like a stylus arm on a record player) to skip all over the disk to find the scattered parts.

SSDs, on the other hand, contain no moving parts and the parts of a file can be read at the same speed, no matter where they’re scattered. This makes defragmenting an SSD pointless.

More pertinently, SSD drives have a finite lifespan that depends on how often data is written to their memory chips. While this is likely to be longer than the lifespan of the computers they’re used in, regular – and unnecessary – defragmentation will nonetheless reduce it.

So the short answer to your question is that with an SSD, you never again need to worry about file defragmentation.