Posted by Douglas Johnston on 07/11/2019 09:40:37:
That's interesting about the defrag not being required, I must check to see if that needs disabling. With regard to changing the drive oneself, I could have saved a few quid but there could have been complications with a drive on its last legs and it is many years since I have delved inside a computer. In the past when money was a lot tighter I would probably have done it myself, but there is a lot to be said for the convenience of having it done by an expert.
When I had a look online about SSD's I did discover that they have a theoretical limited life but that does not seem to be a major issue for most users.
Doug
Defrag – that's a Microsoft feature – how quaint!
Seriously though, a file stored on a hard disk consists of a linked list of smallish blocks. On an empty disk these are physically written in sequence on the magnetic media and can thus be read very quickly. But as the disk fills up and files are deleted, new blocks will be written into whatever spare space has become available. Then, in order to read a file, the head has to jump from track to track as it follows the list. As physically moving the head takes an eternity, it may be worth defragmenting the disk every so often. All this does is to reorganise the physical blocks so that more of them can be read in order without the head changing track. Being electronic, with no delays due to head movement, an SSD doesn't care much about where blocks are located in memory – it can read and write fragmented files as fast as unfragmented files. And, because SSDs have a relatively limited read-write life, it doesn't pay to waste them on unnecessary defrag reorganisations.
As disk fragmentation has been an obvious problem since disks were invented much effort has been put into developing file-systems that minimise the effects. Microsoft's NTFS is not the best of all possible file systems, and UNIX / Linux / Mac / Android systems all use 'better' alternatives that don't need the same level of periodic cleansing.
A good combination if there's space is to combine the advantages of SSDs and Hard Drives by using both. An SSD is excellent at speeding everything up but they are pricey and short lived compared with a hard drive for storing bulk data. It pays to organise a computer so everything system is on the SSD while everything user is on a hard-drive. Then the time sensitive operating system goes like the wind, whilst less time critical user data turns up in due course. As operating systems can use both drives in parallel, an SSD + HD will perform nearly as well as a single SSD computer, whilst the HD takes much of the strain that would otherwise reduce SSD life times.
That said, these days I wouldn't worry too much about SSD lifetimes, as with all things electronic they get better every year.
Personally, I prefer replacing unreliable computers over about 5 years old because new ones are so much better! As technology is still advancing rapidly, new computers come with more cores and memory, plus faster processors, memory, bulk storage, graphics, networking and multi-media. The improvement will be obvious.
As a career IT person I normally do computer maintenance myself but I think taking a sick computer to a professional is a sensible way to get it fixed. I'm always conscious the facilities I have at home for diagnosing and mending computers are inferior to what was available at work. A professional should have skills, experience, knowledge and tools. Paying for them rather than bumbling around in a fog is often the smart option!
Dave
Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 07/11/2019 14:02:28