Fitting new SSD - the day has come

Not worth defragmenting the original disk at this stage. The files will be turned into contiguous ones on the new driver during the copy phase.

Incidentally defragmentation of an SSD does nothing useful at all and shortens its working life. Certain OS settings should be reconfigured when an SSD is fitted. I think the utilities that come with them these days will do it for you. Things that make sense on spinning rust make no sense at all on solid state drives where seek time is near zero.

Running windows to try and rescue a bad disk will almost invariably make things worse. Especially if the damage is on the same drive as the system swap file. It can do additional damage due to making simple minded "repairs" that will turn the problem from mostly repairable with a few minor losses using the right disk recovery tools to mostly wrecked with a few lucky files that can still be recovered.

Depends on the software.

If you use Macrium, and you "clone with resize", the act of resizing changes how the clone happens, and fragmentation (such as it is) is much reduced.

You might start with a 1TB HDD partially filled with files and not full. Then transfer that to a 512GB SSD. When you do the clone in that case, the partition is resized to fit, and the transfer operation is closer to being file-by-file.

[Picture] If the frame is blank, right-click and select "Reload"

formatting link

As visuals go, it's hard to tell from the colours, what is going on, but yellow is fragmentation, and in that prepared example, the fragmentation is all directory fragmentation, as the files themselves are too small to fragment. It took

1.5 hours to clone a "drive" with 6 million files. If the transfer had not required a resize, it would not take 1.5 hours to process. As it's a synthetic test case and not a real drive. It took a lot more hours to create the collection programmatically (file system *hates* file creation).

That view is as seen at the outside of the SSD.

The Flash Translation Layer is a separate issue, and the order of storage inside the SSD is not linear. That's storage fragmentation we cannot view/visualize from the outside.

If you pull a flash chip from a modern SSD, and naively read out the contents, the contents are virtually unrecognizable. There is more than one reason for this (crypto!).

Paul