So, does the firmware do it's best to not reuse the same area of the disk for writes? Where is all of that taken care of?
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Does the SSD do it's best to spread the data over the disk?
- Thread starter steffi
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Plymouthbreezer
macrumors 601
Eidorian
macrumors Penryn
Post of the day!
I hope that the disk controller for today's SSD drives spread writes across the disk. You do raise a good question though. How would we check?
clayj
macrumors 604
Hrm.
The OP's point, I believe, is that Flash drives and SSDs have a limited number of rewrites per physical byte, which means that if you run them long enough and the same bytes get used over and over, eventually they can stop working. Spreading the "wear" out would effectively lengthen the lifespan of the entire SSD.
Assuming that's correct, I think I read somewhere that the effective lifespan of the SSDs released late last year was in the decades, something like 50 years or so.
EDIT: For what it's worth, I think you're a lot more likely to suffer a hard drive failure (motor, bearings, etc.) long before SSD byte fatigue becomes an issue.
Mindflux
macrumors 68000
Eidorian
macrumors Penryn
Defragmenting a SSD drive sounds like a death sentence since you're copying so much data in most cases.
You're probably going to need to talk to the controller and examine the translation of logical to physical writes. Failing such technology prowess you can always ask the vendor.
Mindflux
macrumors 68000
I didn't say to defrag it, I check it in defrag. Which is pre-defragmentation analyzing.
Since data wouldn't be written contiguously it would make sense that defrag would report fragmentation.