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ssd defrag
I have an old dell xpsl702x laptop with two 256GB ssd drives which are full
and dell won't sell me any larger ssd drives. Defrag has been running for almost day now. Is it worth defragging to get space back or is defragging ssd not going to gain much space when it finally finishes. |
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ssd defrag
In message , Grease Monkey
writes: I have an old dell xpsl702x laptop with two 256GB ssd drives which are full and dell won't sell me any larger ssd drives. Defrag has been running for almost day now. Is it worth defragging to get space back or is defragging ssd not going to gain much space when it finally finishes. With modern OSs and drive sizes, defragging doesn't recover that much space. But the main thing is, defragging on SSD drives might significantly reduce their life, as they have significantly fewer write cycles than HDs. If you really want to defrag them, _move_ their contents to another drive (preferably an HD one), then move them back: this will only involve one write (for most of their sectors; two to their directory sectors). [Obviously if one of them is the OS drive, you can't move all the files in this way, but it may still be worth doing.] It's almost certainly worth reviewing what you're storing whe do you really have 512G of material that you want SSD-speed access to? -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf No sense being pessimistic. It wouldn't work anyway. - Penny Mayes, UMRA, 2014-August |
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ssd defrag
On 30/10/2018 15:15, Grease Monkey wrote:
I have an old dell xpsl702x laptop with two 256GB ssd drives which are full and dell won't sell me any larger ssd drives. Go to other online stores and buy from them. These drives are standard and so you can buy from whoever wants to make a profit from you. Defrag has been running for almost day now. Not surprised because it is completely unnecessary and waste of time. Is it worth defragging to get space back or is defragging ssd not going to gain much space when it finally finishes. No because defragging never recovers and space. Why should it recover anything when the data is there there on the disk? You will find that using a SSD drive in your old machine is completely stupid. SSDs are not what advertisers say. You might save a few seconds in start-up but you will get better mileage pound for pound buying an ordinary Seagate or WD normal drives (not SSDs). -- With over 950 million devices now running Windows 10, customer satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows. |
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ssd defrag
On 10/30/2018 10:27 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Grease Monkey writes: I have an old dell xpsl702x laptop with two 256GB ssd drives which are full and dell won't sell me any larger ssd drives. Defrag has been running for almost day now. Is it worth defragging to get space back or is defragging ssd not going to gain much space when it finally finishes. With modern OSs and drive sizes, defragging doesn't recover that much space. But the main thing is, defragging on SSD drives might significantly reduce their life, as they have significantly fewer write cycles than HDs. If you really want to defrag them, _move_ their contents to another drive (preferably an HD one), then move them back: this will only involve one write (for most of their sectors; two to their directory sectors). [Obviously if one of them is the OS drive, you can't move all the files in this way, but it may still be worth doing.] It's almost certainly worth reviewing what you're storing whe do you really have 512G of material that you want SSD-speed access to? It's really not necessary to defrag an SSD as their seek time is so close to Zero that not much would be gained and some life would be lost. Rene |
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ssd defrag
Il giorno Tue 30 Oct 2018 04:50:07p, *Rene Lamontagne* ha inviato su
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general il messaggio . Vediamo cosa ha scritto: It's really not necessary to defrag an SSD as their seek time is so close to Zero right: going from cluster 10 to 11 to 12 to 13 takes the same time from 15 to 123456789 to 654 to 876543219 -- /-\ /\/\ /\/\ /-\ /\/\ /\/\ /-\ T /-\ -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- - -=- http://www.bb2002.it ............ [ al lavoro ] ........... |
#6
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ssd defrag
In message , Rene Lamontagne
writes: On 10/30/2018 10:27 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: In message , Grease Monkey writes: I have an old dell xpsl702x laptop with two 256GB ssd drives which are full and dell won't sell me any larger ssd drives. Defrag has been running for almost day now. Is it worth defragging to get space back or is defragging ssd not going to gain much space when it finally finishes. With modern OSs and drive sizes, defragging doesn't recover that much space. But the main thing is, defragging on SSD drives might significantly reduce their life, as they have significantly fewer write cycles than HDs. If you really want to defrag them, _move_ their contents to another drive (preferably an HD one), then move them back: this will only involve one write (for most of their sectors; two to their directory sectors). [Obviously if one of them is the OS drive, you can't move all the files in this way, but it may still be worth doing.] It's almost certainly worth reviewing what you're storing whe do you really have 512G of material that you want SSD-speed access to? It's really not necessary to defrag an SSD as their seek time is so close to Zero that not much would be gained and some life would be lost. Rene If you re-read Grease Monkey's post, he wasn't doing it for speed. -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf Who were your favourite TV stars or shows when you were a child? Sadly they've all been arrested ... Ian Hislop, in Radio Times 28 September-4 October 2013 |
#7
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ssd defrag
Grease Monkey,
Is it worth defragging to get space back In one word ? No. That is, you seem to have misunderstood what defrag actually does. It doesn't reclaim lost space (thats the absolute first time I've heard about it supposingly doing that by the way), it just gathers and reorders the parts of a file so that they are in a sequential order (it un-fragments them. Hence the name de-frag). While that sped up seek times on drives with mechanical arms that moved the read/write head from cylinder to cylinder, an SSD doesn't have any such thing (or anything else that could influence seek times in that way), so its absolutily not nessecary. As for reclaiming lost space ? You could use a quick, non-surface-checking chkdsk (or alike). The first question though is: How do you think a drive *loses* space in normal operation? That can only happen when things go very wrong and the disk operation is catastrophically interrupted (like a hard powerdown while writing). Next to that, NTFS and later filesystems are pretty-much self recovering. In other words, it only applies to FAT(8/12/16/32) disks. So no, a filesystem equal-or-above NTFS doesn't need it. Regards, Rudy Wieser |
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ssd defrag
On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 16:51:18 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote: In message , Rene Lamontagne writes: On 10/30/2018 10:27 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: In message , Grease Monkey writes: I have an old dell xpsl702x laptop with two 256GB ssd drives which are full and dell won't sell me any larger ssd drives. Defrag has been running for almost day now. Is it worth defragging to get space back or is defragging ssd not going to gain much space when it finally finishes. With modern OSs and drive sizes, defragging doesn't recover that much space. But the main thing is, defragging on SSD drives might significantly reduce their life, as they have significantly fewer write cycles than HDs. If you really want to defrag them, _move_ their contents to another drive (preferably an HD one), then move them back: this will only involve one write (for most of their sectors; two to their directory sectors). [Obviously if one of them is the OS drive, you can't move all the files in this way, but it may still be worth doing.] It's almost certainly worth reviewing what you're storing whe do you really have 512G of material that you want SSD-speed access to? It's really not necessary to defrag an SSD as their seek time is so close to Zero that not much would be gained and some life would be lost. Rene If you re-read Grease Monkey's post, he wasn't doing it for speed. Right, he was doing it to regain space, which is even worse. Defragging doesn't reclaim space. Then, there's the whole issue of not doing it to an SSD in the first place. Bottom line, it was a bad idea from the start. If he's running out of space, he should either: 1. Replace one of the laptop's internal drives with a larger one. No need to involve Dell in that decision since they use standard drives that can be purchased anywhere. Use youtube to get the replacement procedure. 2. Augment the internal storage capacity with an external drive. My choice would be #1, but #2 seems to be popular around these newsgroups. -- Char Jackson |
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ssd defrag
On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 13:49:18 -0500, Char Jackson
wrote: On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 16:51:18 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote: In message , Rene Lamontagne writes: On 10/30/2018 10:27 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: In message , Grease Monkey writes: I have an old dell xpsl702x laptop with two 256GB ssd drives which are full and dell won't sell me any larger ssd drives. Defrag has been running for almost day now. Is it worth defragging to get space back or is defragging ssd not going to gain much space when it finally finishes. With modern OSs and drive sizes, defragging doesn't recover that much space. But the main thing is, defragging on SSD drives might significantly reduce their life, as they have significantly fewer write cycles than HDs. If you really want to defrag them, _move_ their contents to another drive (preferably an HD one), then move them back: this will only involve one write (for most of their sectors; two to their directory sectors). [Obviously if one of them is the OS drive, you can't move all the files in this way, but it may still be worth doing.] It's almost certainly worth reviewing what you're storing whe do you really have 512G of material that you want SSD-speed access to? It's really not necessary to defrag an SSD as their seek time is so close to Zero that not much would be gained and some life would be lost. Rene If you re-read Grease Monkey's post, he wasn't doing it for speed. Right, he was doing it to regain space, which is even worse. Defragging doesn't reclaim space. Then, there's the whole issue of not doing it to an SSD in the first place. Bottom line, it was a bad idea from the start. Just in case he needs confirmation on both of your points above, yes, they are both correct. |
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ssd defrag
Replying to 10/30 FredW
No, stop defragging your SSD, it will harm your SSD. I disabled the auto defrag per your remarks.... my windows shows my (C drive is 19% fragmented but I'm guessing there is no sense doing any defrags anymore from what everyone told me.... How big should Windows be? Most of my not Windows files seem to be in the AppData folder. Is there a Windows program I can buy to safely clean up AppData? |
#11
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ssd defrag
Grease Monkey wrote:
I have an old dell xpsl702x laptop with two 256GB ssd drives which are full and dell won't sell me any larger ssd drives. Defrag has been running for almost day now. Is it worth defragging to get space back or is defragging ssd not going to gain much space when it finally finishes. I can tell this question is actually about Windows XP, because Windows 7 would not agree (under most circumstances) to defragment. In Windows 7, a rotating hard drive is offered a "Defragment" option, while an SSD is only offered "TRIM". That's usually what you'll see for options. On Windows 10, sometimes the detection of what is an HDD and what is an SSD is screwed up. Which is really really annoying. In any case, this article contains comments under which an SSD would be defragmented by Windows. Yes, Windows will defragment an SSD, sometimes. WinXP is only defragmenting your SSD, because it doesn't know what an SSD is, and doesn't treat it properly. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRe...YourSS D.aspx "Storage Optimizer will defrag an SSD once a month if volume snapshots are enabled. This is by design" The article has more detail. ******* In addition to differences in how "defrag.exe" operates at the policy level, WinXP has archaic partition management behavior. It uses MSDOS divisible-by-63 alignment for things. This is related to the maintenance of CHS geometry stuff. The sectors per track is 63 or something. If you use PTEDIT32.exe, you'll find a disk drive that's come from a WinXP machine, virtually all the "numbers" in there are divisible by 63. Well, guess what ? Flash drives are power-of-two devices. The number 64 is 2^6 and a power of two number. The number 63 is not a power of two (boo and hiss). If a naive preparation of an SSD is attempted on WinXP, the data clusters are mis-aligned with the Flash pages inside. This doubles the number of operations for fractional pieces of stuff. The main reason an enthusiast would care, is it reduces the performance of the drive. The drive will run a little bit faster if properly aligned. You could, for example, pop a SATA SSD into a Windows 7 system and put an NTFS partition on it. Then pop the drive back in an WinXP era laptop, and install WinXP into the partition in question. Now, it will have a 1MB offset from zero, and the 1MB quanta it uses are pretty well guaranteed to align nicely with an SSD. Vista/W7/W8/W10 should do nice things for SSDs. Perhaps the "last read" feature of NTFS is turned off on W7 as well for the SSD (which is a no-cost feature when done on HDD storage). You might be able to change a registry setting for that on WinXP. There are pages and pages of optimization ideas for older OSes. ******* There's a chance your usage of SSDs under WinXP isn't optimized to begin with. Paragon made a realignment tool, which will rearrange the data in a Win7-like manner. There are a number of tools with "casual" alignment behavior, which will drive you crazy when they ignore the settings you feed them. While there are other tools that might look like they do a good job on alignment, you need to do the math at the sector-count level, to know for sure what they propose to do, and what they actually did. ******* The operation you seek is "compression" not "defragmentation". If you have large files which are not frequently used, you can use compression on them. 7ZIP has its own native compression format called .7z which is a bit better than BZIP, and a lot better than GZIP. The tradeoff is processing time. GZIP is a good space/time tradeoff. It gives moderate compression, at good speeds. 7ZIP gives excellent compression, at pig-slow speeds :-) So when you're preparing your high-school yearbook for final compression and storage ("never to be viewed again"), the .7z is a good choice for that. Using .7z for something that will only need to be expanded again tomorrow, you might think twice about that. https://www.7-zip.org/ You also need slack space to re-arrange items. If you need to decompress a 20GB item, you're going to need 20GB of space when you do it. But, it's one of the few ways I can offer you (temporary) assistance, as a means freeing up space. one.img == one.img.7z, then delete one.img two.img == two.img.7z, then delete two.img slowly getting ahead on free space... You need at least enough space for the one.img.7z output. You cannot bootstrap a compression pass on a volume, without some slack... Some items compress wonderfully. If you do "dir" on the entire C: drive and make a filelist, those compress by about a factor of 50. Many other items, do not compress. A movie already has most of the entropy squeezed out of it (the movie has 100:1 compression). There really isn't a lot left to compress. Same goes for some PDF documents, where they might be using internal compression for some objects and streams. Compressing myfolder.gz to myfolder.gz.7z is a mistake, as two compressors in a row aren't quite as efficient as myfolder.7z would be. ******* Since you claim to have two SSD drives, the most likely config is a DVD bay that is converted to use an SSD holder. And that's how you installed the second SSD. There have been some "fat" laptops in the past, that actually had bays for dual 2.5" drives. But those would not be too common. SSD drives come with 44 pin IDE connectors or with the standard 7+15 SATA connector pair on them. Maybe you were buying IDE SSDs from Dell ? IDE SSDs aren't that common any more. There might be a few junk brands around. This is an example of a ginormous SATA SSD. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16820147680 Height 7.00mm === should be similar to your current one may not fit the bay properly from a proper mechanical support issue - could be held in mid-air by the screws. The bay might be 9.5mm high. Capacity 2TB Model SAMSUNG MZ-76P2T0BW (860 Pro series) Price ~$600 https://www.samsung.com/us/computing...6p2t0bw/#specs "Superior endurance Under heavy workloads, endurance is everything. Safely store and render 4K videos and 3D data used by the latest applications, up to 10.7x higher TBW* than the previous 850 PRO. The latest V-NAND technology gives you industry-leading endurance backed by a 5-year or up to 4,800 TBW limited warranty. * Terabyte Written * Warrantied TBW for 860 PRO: 300 TBW for 256 GB model, 600 TBW for 512 GB model, 1,200 TBW for 1 TB model, 2,400 TBW for 2 TB model, 4,800 TBW for 4 TB model. * 5-years or TBW, whichever comes first. For more information on the warranty, please find the enclosed warranty statement in the package. " The TBW number they quote, or the Enterprise DriveWritesPerDay spec, gives an idea of how much endurance the drive has. On some models, the warranted TBW doesn't scale linearly like that with size, so for each product you price or review, you have to collect the information for the various capacities, to understand what you're getting. A cheap drive will have a much lower TBW. The "wear life" in SMART, should be a function of how much of the TBW is used up. Drives can last much longer than the TBW rating. But some drives simply brick when they hit the endurance limit, instead of continuing to operate. This policy is also a reason to reject some brands, because of their end-of-life behavior. You can buy a 256GB drive for $50. Both read and write stop when TBW limit is hit on an Intel drive. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16820167432 128GB $51 144TBW for 256GB $50 288TBW for 512GB $90 576TBW for 1024GB $220 When you take the capacity of the Samsung into account, and the TBW figure, the Samsung might be the better deal. Then, it depends on your faith in the TBW predictions. Summary: You can easily buy another drive. If the laptop is really old, the interfaces are 44 pin IDE and purchase options are limited. If the interface is SATA, you can go to any computer store and pick up a large SSD. Compression is a temporary solution to s space crunch. Compression is no good for movies (a waste of time). Compression of Notepad text documents, is great. Defragmenting does nothing. Stop *right now* as you're ruining the SSD drive! A defragmenter can be stopped at any time. Wait for the drive light to stop flashing. Do *not* power off until the drive light has settled down. On simple defrags, the operation can "stop on a dime". Some consolidation transfers insist on running to completion (a mistake). Defragmentation is made "data-safe" by the MS API. Paul |
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ssd defrag
Grease Monkey wrote:
Replying to 10/30 FredW No, stop defragging your SSD, it will harm your SSD. I disabled the auto defrag per your remarks.... my windows shows my (C drive is 19% fragmented but I'm guessing there is no sense doing any defrags anymore from what everyone told me.... How big should Windows be? Most of my not Windows files seem to be in the AppData folder. Is there a Windows program I can buy to safely clean up AppData? On WinXP, C:\Windows is 5GB (may be .msi or patches bloating things a bit) C:\Program Files is 3GB (your mileage may vary) (my downloads is 31GB today) On WinXP, there is an Application Data folder, whereas Windows 7 would have a AppData folder with the hidden attribute set on it, requiring a change in File Explorer to "see" it. You can use windirstat or sequoiaview to examine a partition for content. The visual display gives size information. Linux also keeps a version of windirstat (kdirstat? something like that). AppData might have your email messages. You wouldn't want to delete those in a sloppy or haphazard way. Cleaning tools must be very selective. If you do decide to use some fancy cleaning tool, at least have a backup image of the partition for when you have regrets about the project later. I try to keep one spare disk around, for "bozo backups", where I need to back up something before I ruin it :-) Some days, my prediction abilities ("will ruin it") are uncannily accurate. I especially liked the day I did a backup of Win7 (just a random backup, no plan at all), and two hours later, destroyed C: (unrecoverable!). And that minty fresh backup was just sitting there, yelling "pick me, pick me". Using Windirstat or Sequoiaview, you should be able to spot the occasional "porker". I've had file systems before, where the removal of one really big file, was all the maintenance it needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinDirStat http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/ Paul |
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ssd defrag
On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 14:04:30 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote: On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 13:49:18 -0500, Char Jackson wrote: On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 16:51:18 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote: In message , Rene Lamontagne writes: On 10/30/2018 10:27 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: In message , Grease Monkey writes: I have an old dell xpsl702x laptop with two 256GB ssd drives which are full and dell won't sell me any larger ssd drives. Defrag has been running for almost day now. Is it worth defragging to get space back or is defragging ssd not going to gain much space when it finally finishes. With modern OSs and drive sizes, defragging doesn't recover that much space. But the main thing is, defragging on SSD drives might significantly reduce their life, as they have significantly fewer write cycles than HDs. If you really want to defrag them, _move_ their contents to another drive (preferably an HD one), then move them back: this will only involve one write (for most of their sectors; two to their directory sectors). [Obviously if one of them is the OS drive, you can't move all the files in this way, but it may still be worth doing.] It's almost certainly worth reviewing what you're storing whe do you really have 512G of material that you want SSD-speed access to? It's really not necessary to defrag an SSD as their seek time is so close to Zero that not much would be gained and some life would be lost. Rene If you re-read Grease Monkey's post, he wasn't doing it for speed. Right, he was doing it to regain space, which is even worse. Defragging doesn't reclaim space. Then, there's the whole issue of not doing it to an SSD in the first place. Bottom line, it was a bad idea from the start. Just in case he needs confirmation on both of your points above, yes, they are both correct. Thanks, KB. ;-) -- Char Jackson |
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ssd defrag
Replying to 10/30 Paul
AppData might have your email messages. You wouldn't want to delete those in a sloppy or haphazard way. I have many aol versions in AppData that are taking up 14 GB which I will maybe see if I can move to the F: drive to clean up C: since I'm at 2% left of C and the machine is at a crawl. I try to keep one spare disk around, for "bozo backups", where I need to back up something before I ruin it :-) I have a terabyte external seagate hard drive but its not SSD. Using Windirstat or Sequoiaview, you should be able to spot the occasional "porker". I've had file systems before, where the removal of one really big file, was all the maintenance it needed. I can't find it yet but when I do find it I will click on it. |
#15
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ssd defrag
Paul wrote:
Grease Monkey wrote: Replying to 10/30 FredW No, stop defragging your SSD, it will harm your SSD. I disabled the auto defrag per your remarks.... my windows shows my (C drive is 19% fragmented but I'm guessing there is no sense doing any defrags anymore from what everyone told me.... How big should Windows be? Most of my not Windows files seem to be in the AppData folder. Is there a Windows program I can buy to safely clean up AppData? On WinXP, C:\Windows is 5GB (may be .msi or patches bloating things a bit) C:\Program Files is 3GB (your mileage may vary) (my downloads is 31GB today) On WinXP, there is an Application Data folder, whereas Windows 7 would have a AppData folder with the hidden attribute set on it, requiring a change in File Explorer to "see" it. You can use windirstat or sequoiaview to examine a partition for content. The visual display gives size information. Linux also keeps a version of windirstat (kdirstat? something like that). AppData might have your email messages. You wouldn't want to delete those in a sloppy or haphazard way. Do you mean App Data or Application Data? I'm guessing the former, but I still haven't figured out the difference, except that App Data has the entries Local, LocalLow, and Roaming, which Application Data doesn't, and the fact that if I want to make any program tweaks down there, I usually end up doing them in Application Data, not App Data. Oh, and in case he can't gain access to these folders in Win 7 (one of my pet peeves), there is a registry hack called "Take Ownership" that rectifies all this Windows 7 permissions and privileges nonsense on a directory. It is called RegOwnIt. https://www.thewindowsclub.com/regow...-registry-keys |
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