Solid State Drive (SSD) limitations?

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So, any new Macbook has a 1 terabyte solid state drive (SSD). I have heard that I should not try to defragment it, or even "clean erase" files on it. Two questions:

1. Any other limitations?

2. What is the reasoning behind this?
 
M

MacInWin

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Two logical reasons:
1. The main reason for defrag on a spinner is that most of the slowdown on a spinner that needs it is caused by the movement of the read/write heads. If a file is spread out over multiple tracks on the drive, the heads have to move all over the place to get the full file read. Same for writing, if the heads have to move all over the place to find space to write a file, that movement is much slower than the data transfer. On SSDs there are no heads and the reads/writes are all electronic, so the benefits of defrag operations are practically nil. (There is also an effect of overloading a drive beyond about 85% that has to do with the rotational speed and data density that you avoid with SSDs, so the old adage of not filling the drive beyond 80-85% isn't as impactive with SSDs as it is with spinners, either.)

2. SSDs have limited numbers of "writes" in them before they start to fail. The limit is pretty high, and you are not likely to hit that limit before you decide to trade in the MBP, but defrag involve LOTS of writes, so the thinking is that there is no reason to use up writes for very little gain in performance.
 
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dbm


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Another side effect of this is that you can't do a 'secure erase' on an SSD in a Mac. Secure erase over writes storage locations with random data to guarantee that there is nothing left to read and this is another activity causing lots of extra writes to the SSD.

I'm not sure whether there is an alternative to secure erase, beyond using File Vault (which I do use)? It wouldn't stop someone accessing deleted data if they had access to your login, but presumably it would be impossible without the login info? Or at least extremely difficult?

ETA: Maybe this is what you were referring to as a 'clean erase' in your original post?
 
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In twenty five years Mac computing yet to use Secure Erase or FileVault. Am told it is great for KGB spies etc.
 
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chas_m

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The problem with FileVault is that one day -- maybe not soon, but one day -- you will either forget the password or the system will simply refuse to recognize the "right" password. And then -- unless you made an UNencrypted backup of the contents -- you're screwed.
 
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And will not be able to do a new install either as the drive will be well and truly locked.
 

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