Mitch Tulloch's Blog

Vista, SSDs and Disk Fragmentation

Solid State Disks (SSDs) can be a great option for laptop computers, but the jury is still out on how reliable the technology is long-term. That’s because frequent disk writes to some types of SSDs can shorten the lifetime of the drives.

This could be a problem for SSD laptops running Windows Vista, for by default Vista runs a scheduled task that regularly defragments your system drive. So it might be a good idea to disable scheduled defragmentation in such a scenario to prevent unnecessary shortening of the lifetime of your SSDs. To do this, open the properties of your system disk from Windows Explorer, select Tools, select Defragment, and deselect the schedule box at the top. Then manually defragment your machine, say, once a month.

Another feature of Vista that could shorten the life of your SSD is the Windows Search service, which by default aggressively keeps its catalog up to date. Unlike defragmentation however, Search is probably something you don’t want to be without. To reduce the activity of the Windows Search service however, you might use Indexing Options in Control Panel to limit the directories Search indexes by default to only those you feel are necessary to effectively perform your work.

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