I seriously don't get why people are always so concerned about P/E cycles on consumer SSDs.
TLC and MLC drives will be good for over a PetaByte each, and by the time you ever even get close to that (even assuming a daily defrag of your SSD), you'd be at the point to where that SSD has been obsoleted far past its usable lifetime.
The fact of the matter is that SSD speeds are increasing much faster year after year than most other components, so the SATA 3 SSD you buy now is already obsoleted by M.2 drives and by the time it _DOES_ die (assuming you keep it in a system long enough to see this point), you'll probably be looking into buying a future standard PCI-E 3.0 x16 based SSD.
It took a year (on average) of 24/7 read/write cyles to destroy the SSDs in the article. So what makes you think that you'll ever approach the point of bricking your SSD due to NAND wear?
Why would anyone execute a defrag operation on SSD storage devices. Defragmentation was/is intended to group files together so that a rotating platter hard drive can read more data sequentially which reduces read/write head seek time. Since SSDs don't have read/write heads that have to be physically moved around during read operations, there's really no reason to defrag them at all. It's a source of unnecessary wear to shuffle data around without a performance benefit.
Yes, thank you for reminding me that a few people who read tech news try to ensure maximum nitpickiness in order to fill an otherwise empty void in their lives.
well to the other poster's point - he was just using defrag as an example operation which in most cases involves a lot of sector re-writes due to re-allocations, not as in an operation to be performed on ssd.
obviously a smart cookie with no whatsoever void in life knew that. sigh.
You're resorting to using a point in different person's post in order to pursue aggressive discussion after the nitpick didn't establish your credibility or make you feel any better.
Why would anyone? Those whom are unaware that SSDs don't need defragmenting. And opposed to what many believe, defragmentation isn't dangerous for the SSD, it just wastes time (during defragmenting, which ties up the SSD's resources for no benefit) and slightly wears the NAND chips more as there are thousands of read/write operations done to shift file blocks around to group them contiguously.
The end result is an SSD that isn't any faster but has experienced a few thousand more read/write cycles.
That's why I said that even with a daily defrag of the SSD it still wouldn't have hit severe enough wear on the NAND chips to cause total drive failure.
It's more likely that in the next ten years the SATA interface will cease to exist on modern motherboards at that time, rather than your SATA based TLC SSD would have bricked itself due to NAND wear. SATA is quickly going the way of IDE.
Windows is smart enough to know that a particular drive is an SSD (at least on Windows 10). It won't perform a full defrag even if you wanted to. Instead, it runs smart optimizations specifically for SSD drives, and does so automatically once a week (which you can also do manually). Neat stuff.
Windows 7 still schedules defrag on SSD's but the schedule doesn't execute on drives it detects TRIM on. On older SSD's and PATA SSD's Windows 7 WILL try to defrag it every Wednesday at 1:00am. Of course most of those drives were SLC or high quality MLC so it didn't matter.
Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 simply TRIM an SSD when you try to defrag then. Also initializing an SSD in disk manager will pass a TRIM command. I'm not sure if a secure erase actually TRIMs and SSD, it should. But a normal format definitely doesn't which is why initializing in Disk manager or diskpart is recommended if you get a used SSD and can't do a secure erase in the BIOS. That way the thing isn't trying to do garbage collection during an OS install or your initial file copy to it.
actually windows 7 is SSD aware and will not defrag a SSD unless you tell it to or a none SSD aware defrag program triggers it (like Norton if file system is more than 5% fragmented) click on scheduled and you only see HDDs that are ticked, Yes all is also ticked as well but below that it only shows HDDs) windows 8 and higher only send a trim command (you can command defrag via command line to do a defrag on a SSD)
if you send a Secure Erase to a SSD and it completes it in less then 10-30 seconds the whole drive has been TRIMMed and also does more it resets the page table as well its basically like new minus NAND wear (and if has encryption doesn't matter if its off or on it also resets the encryption keys as well) i always secure erase when i get new and used SSDs after a firmware update (if its currant i do it anyway as there is no harm doing it)
on Sandforce SSDs a Secure Erase is the only way to get them to full Write performance (trimming is not enough)
it's an example of an intensive operation whose functionality most people can recall, this makes it a good example of a wasteful activity, which he used to drive his point home. I'm amazed you couldn't see that.
defrag will not test or burn out your SSD any more then any thing else (installing a game is more likely to be stressful then anything else as you got lots of read and writes on large 10-50GB of data moving around) most consumer drives can handle 20GB of data Written per day to last 10 years,
Defrag is most likely the Lowest problem you can have writing large amounts of data per day (it only be the first time some data might be reorganised later defrags are unlikely to move a lot of data unless you're storing 5-50GB files on your system that are changing often)
i got a MX100 or 150 500GB SSD in the works computer that does graphic designs with some of them sitting up to 1GB and it has been in that system for 2 years nearly and it has only dropped 1-2% total life (think its had like 9TB written data)
You defrag an SSD because there is a small performance benefit, and it exists because of the way filesystems implement fragmentation via chaining. Let your filesystem get seriously fragmented on your SSD, benchmark a bunch of stuff, defrag, benchmark again. The difference will be much smaller than it would be on platters, but will still be quite obvious.
As detailed in a post by Samus above, modern Windows operating systems won't actually perform a defrag on an SSD. They'll issue a TRIM command which will possibly improve performance depending on the state the drive is in when the TRIM is invoked. I can understand how it's possible to get the impression that you're performing a defrag since the OS tends to hide what's going on behind the scenes from the person at the keyboard.
Not only that, real world performance doesn't differ much in terms of feel. Having said that, I still prefer m.2 drives over SATA drives as they have the correct interface for NVMe and doesn't waste physical space.
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Jay77 - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
The PCIe Revolution sure is slow coming.bug77 - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
So 2000 p/e cycles is a good number these days? I'm disappointed :(Hulk - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
Actually very good for 15nm TLC.JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
I seriously don't get why people are always so concerned about P/E cycles on consumer SSDs.TLC and MLC drives will be good for over a PetaByte each, and by the time you ever even get close to that (even assuming a daily defrag of your SSD), you'd be at the point to where that SSD has been obsoleted far past its usable lifetime.
The fact of the matter is that SSD speeds are increasing much faster year after year than most other components, so the SATA 3 SSD you buy now is already obsoleted by M.2 drives and by the time it _DOES_ die (assuming you keep it in a system long enough to see this point), you'll probably be looking into buying a future standard PCI-E 3.0 x16 based SSD.
It took a year (on average) of 24/7 read/write cyles to destroy the SSDs in the article. So what makes you think that you'll ever approach the point of bricking your SSD due to NAND wear?
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
Why would anyone execute a defrag operation on SSD storage devices. Defragmentation was/is intended to group files together so that a rotating platter hard drive can read more data sequentially which reduces read/write head seek time. Since SSDs don't have read/write heads that have to be physically moved around during read operations, there's really no reason to defrag them at all. It's a source of unnecessary wear to shuffle data around without a performance benefit.XZerg - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
you mean group file blocks together, not files.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
Yes, thank you for reminding me that a few people who read tech news try to ensure maximum nitpickiness in order to fill an otherwise empty void in their lives.XZerg - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
well to the other poster's point - he was just using defrag as an example operation which in most cases involves a lot of sector re-writes due to re-allocations, not as in an operation to be performed on ssd.obviously a smart cookie with no whatsoever void in life knew that. sigh.
BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - link
You're resorting to using a point in different person's post in order to pursue aggressive discussion after the nitpick didn't establish your credibility or make you feel any better.JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
Why would anyone? Those whom are unaware that SSDs don't need defragmenting. And opposed to what many believe, defragmentation isn't dangerous for the SSD, it just wastes time (during defragmenting, which ties up the SSD's resources for no benefit) and slightly wears the NAND chips more as there are thousands of read/write operations done to shift file blocks around to group them contiguously.The end result is an SSD that isn't any faster but has experienced a few thousand more read/write cycles.
That's why I said that even with a daily defrag of the SSD it still wouldn't have hit severe enough wear on the NAND chips to cause total drive failure.
It's more likely that in the next ten years the SATA interface will cease to exist on modern motherboards at that time, rather than your SATA based TLC SSD would have bricked itself due to NAND wear. SATA is quickly going the way of IDE.
lilmoe - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
Windows is smart enough to know that a particular drive is an SSD (at least on Windows 10). It won't perform a full defrag even if you wanted to. Instead, it runs smart optimizations specifically for SSD drives, and does so automatically once a week (which you can also do manually). Neat stuff.Samus - Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - link
Windows 7 still schedules defrag on SSD's but the schedule doesn't execute on drives it detects TRIM on. On older SSD's and PATA SSD's Windows 7 WILL try to defrag it every Wednesday at 1:00am. Of course most of those drives were SLC or high quality MLC so it didn't matter.Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 simply TRIM an SSD when you try to defrag then. Also initializing an SSD in disk manager will pass a TRIM command. I'm not sure if a secure erase actually TRIMs and SSD, it should. But a normal format definitely doesn't which is why initializing in Disk manager or diskpart is recommended if you get a used SSD and can't do a secure erase in the BIOS. That way the thing isn't trying to do garbage collection during an OS install or your initial file copy to it.
leexgx - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
actually windows 7 is SSD aware and will not defrag a SSD unless you tell it to or a none SSD aware defrag program triggers it (like Norton if file system is more than 5% fragmented) click on scheduled and you only see HDDs that are ticked, Yes all is also ticked as well but below that it only shows HDDs) windows 8 and higher only send a trim command (you can command defrag via command line to do a defrag on a SSD)if you send a Secure Erase to a SSD and it completes it in less then 10-30 seconds the whole drive has been TRIMMed and also does more it resets the page table as well its basically like new minus NAND wear (and if has encryption doesn't matter if its off or on it also resets the encryption keys as well) i always secure erase when i get new and used SSDs after a firmware update (if its currant i do it anyway as there is no harm doing it)
on Sandforce SSDs a Secure Erase is the only way to get them to full Write performance (trimming is not enough)
leexgx - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
if a drive can do Random read of 8 MB/sec or higher it will auto disable defragMurloc - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
it's an example of an intensive operation whose functionality most people can recall, this makes it a good example of a wasteful activity, which he used to drive his point home.I'm amazed you couldn't see that.
Samus - Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - link
The only thing defrag is good for on an SSD is actually TESTING its endurance, because that's sure as hell one way to burn it out ;)leexgx - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
defrag will not test or burn out your SSD any more then any thing else (installing a game is more likely to be stressful then anything else as you got lots of read and writes on large 10-50GB of data moving around) most consumer drives can handle 20GB of data Written per day to last 10 years,Defrag is most likely the Lowest problem you can have writing large amounts of data per day (it only be the first time some data might be reorganised later defrags are unlikely to move a lot of data unless you're storing 5-50GB files on your system that are changing often)
i got a MX100 or 150 500GB SSD in the works computer that does graphic designs with some of them sitting up to 1GB and it has been in that system for 2 years nearly and it has only dropped 1-2% total life (think its had like 9TB written data)
defragging will not kill a SSD....
surt - Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - link
You defrag an SSD because there is a small performance benefit, and it exists because of the way filesystems implement fragmentation via chaining.Let your filesystem get seriously fragmented on your SSD, benchmark a bunch of stuff, defrag, benchmark again. The difference will be much smaller than it would be on platters, but will still be quite obvious.
BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - link
As detailed in a post by Samus above, modern Windows operating systems won't actually perform a defrag on an SSD. They'll issue a TRIM command which will possibly improve performance depending on the state the drive is in when the TRIM is invoked. I can understand how it's possible to get the impression that you're performing a defrag since the OS tends to hide what's going on behind the scenes from the person at the keyboard.zodiacfml - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
Not only that, real world performance doesn't differ much in terms of feel. Having said that, I still prefer m.2 drives over SATA drives as they have the correct interface for NVMe and doesn't waste physical space.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
Will Anandtech have any of these drives in for testing? I'm curious about the power consumption in particular.