Solid-state drives (SSDs) offer substantial storage benefits over HDDs. However, they suffer from degradation over time just like hard disk drives (HDDs), and they can make your computer slower as their functionality dwindles.
First, it’s important to understand what an SSD is and what it can offer. The “drive” part of its name is a bit of a misnomer: whereas HDDs contain no magnetic platters that need to be driven by a spindle to function, SSDs possess no moving parts. Instead they utilize interconnected circuit assemblies that store data on flash memory chips.
While they perform the same function, SSDs and HDDs differ in a few key ways. For one, SSDs generally offer more storage. SSDs are also much speedier, making the computer faster, particularly during startup. HDDs still have the upper edge in pricing and availability. They are also easier to resuscitate if they fail, while broken down SSDs can result in complete data loss.
A conventional disk defragmenting tool was never the appropriate solution for SSDs, as these tools perform rewrites on the hard drive, but an SSD stores data differently, making such write cycles unnecessary and even detrimental to the drive. SSDs randomly store data, unlike mechanical drives that are capable of storing them sequentially in sectors.
Window 10 will occasionally identify an SSD for “defragmenting,” but it performs what is more accurately dubbed a cleaning only if it is necessary and only if system restore is enabled. System Mechanic’s drive defragmenting features identify which drives are SSDs and automatically leaves them untouched. You will still need to periodically realign data on your traditional hard drives, however.
System Mechanic’s Disk Defragmenter is an effective means of keeping drives healthy, by pre-emptively writing to disk in contiguous data segments.
Disk Defragmenter is easily accessable from the System Mechanic dashboard >> Toolbox >> Speed Up.
