![]() Hyperfast and Perfect Disk will defrag your drive and will give some performance back, but the end results 'may' be that you decrease the life of your SSD. Defraging a SSD effectively neutralises this wear levelling feature (governed by the controller) which is why it is not recommended to defrag a SSD. Wear levelling ensures that the same blocks are not written to in consecutive and sequential writes giving a fair spread of wear across the entire drive structure. Latency on a SSD is usually measured at around the 0.1ms level and because there are no moving parts accessing the data is lightspeed ahead of a spinning drive. It makes sense to keep all the blocks together and thus limit the amount of work the drive has to do to access these blocks of data. The idea behind defragmenting a drive is to ensure fast access by limiting the amount of work the spinning platters arms have to travel across the platters. The access time has got slower by 6 microseconds ffs :). My X256 system drive, firmware 1.1, has slowed down fractionally over the last month according to the AS SSD benchmark I just ran. I don't dispute that the shifting around of blocks by 'optimization' programs has an effect - enough people here say it is demonstrably true. LBA number 75, say, will always be presented to the computer as LBA 75, although the data for it may have been gathered from any old block, as pointed to by the firmware's internal translate table. But the computer knows nothing about these internal machinations. So every time a block gets written, the firmware flags that block as available for use, and writes the block out to some other location, thus avoiding any single block getting hammered by repetitive use. How does this work? I always thought that "wear levelling" inside the SSD would cause the blocks to move about in a way completely unrelated to the logical sequence presented to the computer. Sufficed to say the drive has a distinct set of bench figures with Crystal when degraded and this "Psudo-TRIM" method produced that pattern every single time. I have screenies of this but with an X25-M so I won't post them up (competitor product). One thing I would say, from my testing thus far, don't use the "Tony TRIM" method (Perfectdisk consolidate followed by AS Clean) as for me it has put every SSD I used it on into a "degraded state". It seems that this time is very dependant on an even performance across all transfer sizes, hence the big boost in Warcraft loading times when optimized with Diskeeper. I play WoW and use a lot of 3rd party addons that extend the loading time of the game. You can tell the difference right away in responsiveness after Hyperfast has been run on a moderately used drive/array. Until we get the FW with GC (yes, it will come soon enough, patience is a virtue) Hyperfast is a Godsend for keeping my RAID0 snappy. I was able to smoothe out those minor irregularities I mentioned but when I tested by filling the drive to the max then deleting (using IOMeter) there was no way that Hyperfast could sort it out, it was a Secure Erase job.
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