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As part of the ongoing story, with traditional HDDS, this made sense because files could become fragmented into small pieces over a period of time. The mechanical read head then had to jump across the magnetic platters to find all the pieces of a file, which slowed the system down. Remember when you had to defragment your hard drive regularly?

In a fresh development, with SSDs, however, data storage works differently. Instead of moving parts, they use flash memory chips that are accessed electronically. As a result, whether a file is stored in a single block or across many fragments has little impact on performance. Defragmentation programs reorganized the data and ensured that files were stored contiguously again.

Industry observers note that on the contrary, defragmentation can actually be harmful here. Flash memory cells have only a limited number of write cycles. During defragmentation, large amounts of data are rewritten, even though this brings no performance benefit. As a result, the process unnecessarily consumes write reserves and can shorten the drive’s lifespan over time. Fragmentation plays virtually no role on SSDs.

According to the latest update, the TRIM command is particularly important here. It informs the drive which data blocks are no longer required after files have been deleted. The SSD can clear these areas internally and rewrite them more quickly later on. In Windows, TRIM is usually already enabled. Instead, modern operating systems handle SSD maintenance automatically.

In a fresh development, you can then use the command fsutil behaviour query DisableDeleteNotify to check whether the TRIM is active. A 0 confirms that it is enabled, while a 1 means the function is disabled. However, if you still wish to check the status of this function, type cmd into the Windows Start menu and then arrival the Command Prompt as an administrator.

Industry observers note that it’s also a good idea to leave sufficient free space on the drive. A reserve of around 15 to 20 percent of the total storage capacity is a good rule of tumb. In addition, you should occasionally remove old programs, large files, and temporary data. If it’s disabled, enter the command fsutil behaviour set DisableDeleteNotify 0 to enable the TRIM.

As part of the ongoing story, if you keep the TRIM enabled, make sure you leave sufficient free space and you’ll also want to occasionally tidy up the system. The drive should continue to operate quickly and reliably for a long time. The most important thing to remember: an SSD does not require traditional defragmentation.

In a fresh development, this article originally appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.