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Do SSDs suffer from fragmentation?

Is there an advantage to it? I mean, SSD is essentially random access memory.

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You said it yourself, SSDs are random access. Defragmenting them, as such, provides no benefit, but also wears down the drive by performing a lot of writes. Most modern OS' turn automatic defragmentation off when you're using an SSD, so just don't do it manually and you should be fine.

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    Actually on some SSDs it can provide significant speedups on sequential access (Crucial C300 for example), but this is an issue only in extreme levels of fragmentation.
    – Mircea Chirea
    Oct 19, 2010 at 18:03
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    In the unlikely event of pathological levels of fragmentation causing a noticeable slowdown on an SSD, taking an image and reapplying it would probably cause much less wear on the SSD than defragging would.
    – afrazier
    Oct 19, 2010 at 18:47
  • @afrazier, sure, that's also the best way to do it with ANY drive, it's just one huge read and write operation. Most people don't need sequential access, all decent SSDs have massive speeds on these operations.
    – Mircea Chirea
    Dec 13, 2010 at 10:57
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    In the kind of scenarios we're talking about, defragmenting the drive may not restore drive performance to full (or near full) capacity. That said, most good modern controllers have TRIM or background garbage collection. Just freeing up some space and letting the system sit idle overnight might be all that needs done. If that doesn't help, then a secure erase is the only thing that will.
    – afrazier
    Dec 13, 2010 at 13:53
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    This information is obsolete and no longer valid. The writes from occasional defragmentation are insignificant and fragmentation does affect performance because each extent of the file has to be processed when the file is accessed and the file metadata is bloated. Fragmentation also has a significant performance affect on snapshotting and versioning.
    – David Schwartz
    Dec 9, 2014 at 20:54
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Since it takes the same time for a SSD to find any file on it (unlike mechanical hard drives where access time can vary depending on where the file is physically located on the platter), there is no reason/need to defragment a SSD.

Additionally, defragging a SSD will decrease the life span of the drive (SSD's have a limited life based on read/writes to the drive). For a more detailed SSD's and how they work, read this article.

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Intel actually tells you NOT to defragment their SSDs. As far as Intel goes, they have their own utilities that help you manage the drive.

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No need to run defrag on any SSD since random and sequential read times as well as sequential write times are not affected by file fragmentation. The randon write times of several SSDs (with the notable exception of the intels) apparently do get affected by free space fragmentation, so some utility that addresses this by free space consolidation may be useful. Unfortunately, the Windows defragger has no such option AFAIK, but there are some commercial defraggers with add-ons that optimize the SSD automatically.

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