SSD Query

[jobdone]

I am soon to be upgrading my pc, getting new ram cpu, motherboard and of course a SSD.

My plan was to get a 120GB SSD for my windows drive, then get a 1TB HDD (to go ontop of my current 500GB) for storage.

When I download TV shows or movies, they would download to the SDD for faster extraction, then when I've watched it, transfer it to the storage drive, when I'm not worried about the taking the time to move it.

But then I've been seeing people say they you shouldn't defrag a SSD as it can brick them?
So that leaves me to understand, that the more data copied/transferred/deleted on the SSD will be negative towards its performance, and slowly degrade it?

If this is true, should I just download strait to my HDD storage drive, and just accept the slower extraction?

[Deleted]

Yes, yes you should.

[Maconi]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

If you have Windows 7, the SSD will TRIM itself and you have nothing to worry about.

[jobdone]

Yes, yes you should.

Is there any truth in it tho is what I'm asking.

Because I see solid state drives to be very similar to ram drives, and they have data moving around on them constantly.

[Dazzy]

You don't need to defrag an ssd. There are no moving parts, your operating system knows exactly where it put everything.

The reason for defragging a typical hard drive is to decrease the movement speed of the heads when accessing data (think of a record player with multiple layers) the closer the data is together for a specific file, the less movement, the faster it is.

Digital is as fast as you can get, it matters not where the data is.

But yes, save anything for storage on a normal hdd. SSD's are generally for speeding up program load/access times. You won't notice the speed difference when accessing large amounts of storage data.

But if you wish to, they won't degrade any more than if you never used it, maybe in hundreds of years they will start dropping bits but you won't see it in your lifetime.

[boneschaman]

But then I've been seeing people say they you shouldn't defrag a SSD as it can brick them?
So that leaves me to understand, that the more data copied/transferred/deleted on the SSD will be negative towards its performance, and slowly degrade it?

If this is true, should I just download strait to my HDD storage drive, and just accepts the slower extraction?

There is no need to defrag it. there is no speed difference between fraged and defraged file access. the ssd has access to every bit always, other than hdd where a physical arm has to move around a disc to find the fragments.

i would suggest download an unzip on your hdd. use the ssd for os/programs/games which you start alot

[Maconi]

http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/03/should-you-defragment-a-ssd/

Solid State Drives can access any location on the drive in the same time. This is one of the main advantages over hard drives. This also means that there is no need to defragment a Solid State Drive ever. These drives have actually been designed to write data evenly in all sectors of the drive which the industry is calling wear leveling.

If you did defragment your Solid State Disk you can rest assured that you did not harm it in any way. It is just that this process is not needed and that defragmentation causes lots of write processes which means that the drive will reach its write limits sooner.

[jobdone]

But yes, save anything for storage on a normal hdd. SSD's are generally for speeding up program load/access times. You won't notice the speed difference when accessing large amounts of storage data.

Isn't the extraction time of a large .rar file bottlenecked by the speed of the hard drive it is extracting too and from?

e.g. 12GB.RAR will extract quicker on the SSD rather then the HDD.

[Deleted]

What's the point in putting movies on SSD? It's mostly for games and software like windows, Visual Studio and such.

With movies, they load perfectly fine from normal HDD too (yes even the 1080p ones) I've actually never had a movie freeze to load or some such.

[Fafna]

I started out with a similar setup.
A SSD for OS and programs, and a normal HDD drive for storing stuff.

Later on I got a second SSD for downloads (and more games)
After the files are downloaded I move them to the 'storage' HDD.
Reason for this? A SSD is silent and uses less W. Since my PC is on 24/7 I also prefer it to be quiet

I think you should use SSD's for programs and a normal HDD's for STORING media stuff like movies and music.

I don't think you need to worry much about wearing out your SSD, the day you manage to use up your drive, it's time to get a new/larger/faster drive anyway.

[Deleted]

Never defrag an SSD!

And there's no need to put your media-files on your SSD before copying them onto your HDD. I'm not sure what "performance" increase you're looking for by doing that.

With a decent HDD, any media file will open near instantly. Only programs, OS's and games should be put on an SSD.

[lockblock]

I am soon to be upgrading my pc, getting new ram cpu, motherboard and of course a SSD.

My plan was to get a 120GB SSD for my windows drive, then get a 1TB HDD (to go ontop of my current 500GB) for storage.

When I download TV shows or movies, they would download to the SDD for faster extraction, then when I've watched it, transfer it to the storage drive, when I'm not worried about the taking the time to move it.

But then I've been seeing people say they you shouldn't defrag a SSD as it can brick them?
So that leaves me to understand, that the more data copied/transferred/deleted on the SSD will be negative towards its performance, and slowly degrade it?

If this is true, should I just download strait to my HDD storage drive, and just accept the slower extraction?

I would like to note that players such as xbmc play media inside of zip/rar and other archive formats without having to manually extract beforehand
In fact I never extract my media even if its spanned through multiple volumes as its pointless

[Fafna]

And there's no need to put your media-files on your SSD before copying them onto your HDD. I'm not sure what "performance" increase you're looking for by doing that.

With a decent HDD, any media file will open near instantly. Only programs, OS's and games should be put on an SSD.

If that was a reply to my post: My hard drives turn themselfs off after a while (15 mins?). I put torrents (downloads) on the SSD
because it's silent and and keeps cooler. This means the normal HDD is just turned on when I want to consume media and not 24/7.

But youre right, speedwise it's no difference at all. Just less noicy.

[Asera]

Depending how full the SSD is, data consolidation defrag (which isn't exactly defragging persay) still helps, mostly in terms of mitigating a possible corruption of the file system, which is something a lot of people forget about with data fragmentation. Fragmentation = messy partition tables = more room for errors = you get the idea. Mydefrag has a function for it, I ran it once a month when I used it as a boot drive. Since it's now just a WoW drive with a scratch partition and tiny page file, I don't bother anymore. It doesn't move much, just stuff that's extremely split up.

As an example of how little it moves... running it on my WoW drive, it completes in about 14 seconds, and all it did was consolidate pieces of a patch mpq file, probably from 4.2.