Hi Shane:
I've worked in electronics for over 50 years and even spent 5 years at a company making transistors and I've never heard of one having a limited number of cycles (from off to on for example). After all a computer chip is little more then a massive collection of transistors (with some other items deposited on the substrate) interconnected however the manufacture wants. Where do these "cycles" come from?
Hi Jack:
Now I see one of the ways the speed is increased.
Thanks gents,
Ben
Ben,
SSDs are basically a modern version of EEROMs.
We used to use a special burner to setup the EEROMs for the equipment I was testing and repairing. The chips in those days were a lot slower, i.e. 28ms instead of the ns speeds we see today. The chips are written at a higher voltage and read at another. The very act of writing the data changes the substrate to hold the data. Writing too much in the same place will eventually degrade or kill the cells where the data is written. The same process works today albeit with much smaller voltages and everything is higher speed.
By using special algorithms in the SSDs onboard BIOS located on the controller, on the same PCboard inside the case of some drives, the devices utilize scatter-gather technology to spread the data writes over various cells instead of concentrating all the data in one place. By defragmenting an SSD, you are actually also defeating the purpose of this technology as well as degrading the unit because of the continuous writes to the cells.
Since there are no moving parts, there is no reason to defragment the SSD unit as the data is read back, though much slower than DRAM chips, much faster than any platter-type hard drive could ever be. Defragmenting works on platter drives because the drive heads are mechanically moved around to read the data, and by placing the data bits close to each other, there is less head movement, which makes the overall read process faster.
I hope this explains things...
Getting back to the OP's question, yes, defragging really helps if you are doing a lot of work in CM and importing and fixing data.
John