A relevant question notwithstanding. I don't think current operating systems do anything to prevent you running a defrag on an SSD, which will do nothing, other than shorten the life of the drive.
SSD or "spinning rust"?
Why does a back-up program (Acronis) produce so much fragmentation? My external drive is showing 42%. Is it best to defragment the drive periodically or not to defragment it due to the risk of damage occurring during the defragmentation process?
Surely a 'trick' question, SSDs do not require defragmentation .
"How to Defragment Your Hard Drive in Windows 10 Open the disk optimization tool by searching for "optimize" or "defrag" in the taskbar. Select your hard drive and click Analyze. Note that if you have a SSD, this option is grayed out and not available."
That's from a Jan 2016 article, so it looks like Win10 has stopped users defragging SSDs for at least the last 4 years.
I'm just interested to know why you think the back up program is causing fragmentation? Can you explain, please?
Most likely because that?s all that writes to that particular external drive.
Does the OP know that?
Have you got multiple backup jobs writing to the external disk in parallel?
When a backup program writes only changes to the disc, fragmentation is the inevitable result. If you copy all files to a wiped disc, no fragmentation.
NT
The why depends on the back up process, ie if its only backing up changes its probably selectively removing archives which have altered and then putting new copies back, it will have to fragment them if the size changes. I don't know what disc management is in bespoke back up software. Unless space is short, I'd not bother much, since restoring is not exactly a fast process at any time. Brian
Yes I never defrag an ssd, though I have learned that defragging the registry seems to help, but other than that I doubt it makes much difference. Brian
But why would you want to use an ssd for a back in any case? Brian
Was scratching my head as to why this fragmentation was a surprise! Agreed.
In my experience, sometimes various log files, which are opened, have a few bytes written, then closed, are the worst individual files.
Also, the fastest defragmentation of such files is to copy the file, delete the old one, and rename the copy.
The fastest defragmentation of a drive which has more than trivial levels of fragmentation, is often to copy the contents to another drive - but it does depend on how you do that.
The simplest way of reducing unavoidable fragmentation is to up the allocation unit size - but that wastes space if there are lots of smaller files.
it's quite likely the output will be a single huge compressed (encrypted?) file.
I recently replaced the SSD in my desktop PC with a larger SSD (512 rather than the restrictive 128). So I put the old SSD in a USB enclosure. Might well use it for some sort of backup - no other feasible use for it at present.
SSDs are particularly appropriate for file history backups.
But since SSD are the storage eeuivalent of a Minister Of Defence (here today, gone tomorrow), you back up the SSD on something slightly more reliable, like a conventional hard disk (or 2,3)
I do! It's a 4TB hard drive.
No expertise to provide a technical explanation. Why I think it is because the back-up is incremental so I assumed this would affect the inital file and create lots of small files. I may be wrong.
Have you got any reference or citation to back this assertion up?
#Paul
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