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Coupla observations....
1. Movie: the guy talks about how fast defrag is. But why defrag a flash drive? Defrag was
originally to keep files' sectors/clusters in order to avoid excessive head-movement thrashing,
slowing down access. With SSDs there's no head movement (and even with magnetic platter
HDDs, the bad block revectoring may well move some areas around so that logical block addresses
are physically in differing areas on the disk, requiring head movement). Defrag can be useful
for keeping a drive up to par in case it crashes and you wanna recover data from it, but NTFS
is a pretty good filesystem and recovery is good despite defrag.
2. Intensity of use/wear: Most folks, even intense users, won't wear the SSD from their
actual work files. Internal wear-levelling algorithms that remap LBA sectors/clusters the fly to avoid "high traffic" on a given area of the silicon. If your PC is paging/swapping a lot you don't have enough DRAM anyway, and the quality SSDs have their own internal large DRAM cache + algorithms to mititgate a lot of this "traffic" issue. I believe newer Windows releases (Vista? 7?) are smarter in HDD access too, if they know an SSD drive is being used.
We use flash devices in our camcorders and don't have to worry about flash wear.
I'm probably gonna add an SSD drive on my work PC (ThinkPad W500), on my own nickel. There's tons of Big Corp security software loaded that makes doing builds slow and this can really help. Plus it's gotta help battery life.
1. Movie: the guy talks about how fast defrag is. But why defrag a flash drive? Defrag was
originally to keep files' sectors/clusters in order to avoid excessive head-movement thrashing,
slowing down access. With SSDs there's no head movement (and even with magnetic platter
HDDs, the bad block revectoring may well move some areas around so that logical block addresses
are physically in differing areas on the disk, requiring head movement). Defrag can be useful
for keeping a drive up to par in case it crashes and you wanna recover data from it, but NTFS
is a pretty good filesystem and recovery is good despite defrag.
2. Intensity of use/wear: Most folks, even intense users, won't wear the SSD from their
actual work files. Internal wear-levelling algorithms that remap LBA sectors/clusters the fly to avoid "high traffic" on a given area of the silicon. If your PC is paging/swapping a lot you don't have enough DRAM anyway, and the quality SSDs have their own internal large DRAM cache + algorithms to mititgate a lot of this "traffic" issue. I believe newer Windows releases (Vista? 7?) are smarter in HDD access too, if they know an SSD drive is being used.
We use flash devices in our camcorders and don't have to worry about flash wear.
I'm probably gonna add an SSD drive on my work PC (ThinkPad W500), on my own nickel. There's tons of Big Corp security software loaded that makes doing builds slow and this can really help. Plus it's gotta help battery life.
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