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uicandrew

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 19, 2006
555
3
i've installed and uninstalled a 30gb bootcamp partition 3-4 times on my stock 128gb ssd on my macbook air.

normally, on my old macbook or imac (with a regular hard drive), i would defrag my hard drive if i used it to move or work with very large files.

but with TRIM, i don't know if it is necessary or not
 

Azathoth

macrumors 6502a
Sep 16, 2009
659
0
i've installed and uninstalled a 30gb bootcamp partition 3-4 times on my stock 128gb ssd on my macbook air.

normally, on my old macbook or imac (with a regular hard drive), i would defrag my hard drive if i used it to move or work with very large files.

but with TRIM, i don't know if it is necessary or not

The magnetic head of a traditional HDD requires an average of 8ms to move to a random part of the disk (only down from 30ms in the late 90s) - this is one of the major bottlenecks in real-life data throughput.

Defragmenting ensures that files are on continuous sectors, minimising the head movement to once per file (ideally).

SSDs do not have a physical read/write head, therefore de-fragmenting would not provide a noticeable increase in speed AFAIK.

TRIM support addresses a different issue, but could roughly be considered the SSD analog to HDD defragmenting.
 

mopatops

macrumors regular
Jul 21, 2011
159
32
UK
As far as I'm aware, files on SSDs are spread across the chips on purpose in order to increase read/write speed.
 

duffyanneal

macrumors 6502a
Feb 5, 2008
681
108
ATL
As far as I'm aware, files on SSDs are spread across the chips on purpose in order to increase read/write speed.

The data is spread out as a form of wear leveling. That way the individual memory cells get written to evenly. Effectively, increasing the life of the individual cells and the drive.
 
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