PerfectDisk 12 SSD Optimization?

There are 2 camps. One that says free sapce consolidation helps SSD performance. The other says free space consolidation is just plain useless. I'm of the latter.

If a SSD, by nature, does not require defragmenting, then how will free space consolidation help it? I'm not so much worried about shortening the life of the drive since a normal user would require years to accomplish the lifetime writes of a SSD. By that time everyone will have moved on to SATA5 or SATA6 SSDs.

Free space helps because it's quicker to write to truly free space rather than writing to available space, the latter being a location where a file has been deleted but not cleaned up yet by GC / TRIM.

Does this mean:

Free Space Consolidation = Manual GC ?

This would be a godsend if this was true. I will not have to idle my pc overnight anymore.

It's a similar question about Diskeeper Hyperfast.

Might be interesting to read.

http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?p=521865#post521865

I copied the following from Raxco's site.

I have a Solid State Drive (SSD). Is it appropriate or safe to optimize/defragment with PerfectDisk or will it wear out the drive?

PerfectDisk 12 has a special SSD Optimize method that improves the performance of SSD drives' write performance.

To write a sector, the file system needs to read and merge the data, then erase and write back a data block, which is bigger than a sector, called an "erase block." The size of the sector is 1 - 4MB, which is much bigger than the sector size. By consolidating free space, the process of transferring data between erase blocks can be reduced or eliminated.

SSD Optimize is an optimization method specifically for SSDs that focuses on free space consolidation without defragmentation of files. Solid State Drives are not affected by file fragmentation like traditional electromechanical disk drives. As such, it will leave files in a fragmented state while consolidating free space into several large pieces. SSD Optimize is included as a standard feature in all editions of PerfectDisk 12.

Frankly, I still don't know what free space consolidation is besides Raxco insisting it's good for your SSD. When it consolidates free space won't it have to erase and write again? So how does it come up with real "free space" as opposed to "available space".

If anyone can make sense of the above please enlighten stupid old me. Thank you.

I'm curious too. Please let us know in this thread once they give an answer. Thanx

---bookmarked----

Haven't had a response from anyone at Raxco though the long weekend has ended. Fortunately, I don't plan on being their customer.

Anyway, I did do some reading on their forum and it seems you need TRIM to work with their Free Space Consolidation (FSC) or else FSC would be useless. This means, all FSC does is clump together free space, writing and erasing in the process, and relies on TRIM to clean the drive thereafter. This rules out RAIDed drives. I'd rather depend on Garbage Collection in this case.

I think PD's FSC is just another marketing gimmick and any benefits you might gain from it ain't going to be obvious.

I received a reply from someone whom I believe is a Raxco staff.

The SSD optimization pass identifies the largest consolidated free space chunk already existing on your SSD and grows it. This results in a larger consolidated free space chunk on the volume - but the primary reason for doing so is to maximize the number of blocks which can be trimmed by the OS or the device. This is increases the effectiveness of garbage collection. (TRIM)

Edit: I want to make clear here that while the pass effectively increases free space consolidation - it should not be confused with our normal free space consolidation pass since that pass defragments files and creates a large free space gap at the end of the drive. The SSD optimization pass does not defragment files and it does not consolidate free space at the end of the drive, instead it grows the largest existing gap on the volume. The two should not be confused.

The pass is designed to do this without creating excessive erase/write cycles - and this is evidenced by how quickly this optimization pass runs. Our SSD optimization pass won't have your SSD churning through data and can be run as often as you like.

I was confused about the "growing free space" part. Let's see how he replies.

Well, I'm as confused as you are.

How does it grow the free space/gap without moving the existing data around ?

When a sector is occupied, it is occupied. To increase the gap, the data should still be moved to other places. Maybe not to the extent of moving all the data to the beginning of the drive & leaving all free space at the end , but it still sounds like a partial defrag.

Well, I'm as confused as you are.

How does it grow the free space/gap without moving the existing data around ?

When a sector is occupied, it is occupied. To increase the gap, the data should still be moved to other places. Maybe not to the extent of moving all the data to the beginning of the drive & leaving all free space at the end , but it still sounds like a partial defrag.

While you're waiting for Erwin's response in the user community, here's a clarification of the defrag/optimization algorithms PerfectDisk uses. Keep in mind, you can automate and set a schedule for any of these or a combination of these.

• SMARTPlacement Defragmentation: Our patented default defragmentation algorithm defragments all your files, consolidates free space, and optimizes the drive according to file usage. It provides the most complete defragmentation possible and slows down refragmentation of your drive. It may still leave small blocks of free space between files if the PerfectDisk engine determines this would take too much time for a minimal performance gain.
   
  
• Consolidate Free Space Defragmentation: This method defragments all the files and consolidates free space but it does not optimize file placement. This process can involve moving large files to reclaim relatively small amounts of free space (a maneuver that PerfectDisk omits when using SMARTPlacement by itself) and explains why this mode sometimes takes longer to complete. Free space consolidation is best for shrinking or growing disk partitions, when seeking to re-size virtual machines, or to provide a boost to lagging Windows performance when PerfectDisk itself recommends running this defragmentation algorithm.
   
  
• Defragment Only Pass: This method defragments only fragmented files without attempting to place files according to usage patterns or attempting to consolidate free space. It provides the fastest defragmentation pass but is not the most thorough. It should only be used if you have lots of free space. Since no attempt is made to clear free space to place files, any file that cannot be fit in to an existing free space hole is skipped.
   
  
• SSD Optimize: SSDs are not affected by file fragmentation like traditional electromechanical disk drives. This method of optimizing Solid State Drives focuses on free space consolidation without defragmentation of files. As such, it will leave files in a fragmented state while consolidating free space into large pieces, improving SSD write performance. Whitepaper: http://www.raxco.com/user_data/white_papers/perfectdisk_and_solid_state_drives_ssds_6_1_2011.pdf
   
  
• Prep for Shrink: This strategy is specifically designed to pack all data to the beginning of a volume and may result in the creation of file fragmentation as a result. The primary purpose of this pass is to prep a partition or volume for the best possible resize or shrink. As such, it should not be used unless it is the user's intent to resize or shrink a volume or partition.
  

Lauren

@RaxcoSoftware

http://www.raxco.com

So the SSD white paper says:

PerfectDisk will automatically identify SSD storage and if configured to optimize performance, will perform a Consolodate Free Space pass on the drive. PerfectDisk does not do this automatically. You must specifically tell PerfectDisk to optimize the drive. PerfectDisk allows you to perform this pass manually or on a scheduled basis. In addition, you can configure PerfectDisk to only optimize the SSD storage if free space fragmentation exceeds a specified threshold.

You stated that a Consolodate Free Space pass optimizes your SSD based upon data location and not frequency of data used.

In otherwords... it defrags.

Erwin has kindly responded.

Growing free space:

By moving out data into blocks that are not full. This quickly eliminates as many partially full blocks as possible. This is done using a one shot method, so there is no use of swap space (no churn). The result is a marked increase in the number of blocks which can be trimmed in exchange for incurring a single read/write cycle for a very small number of partially full blocks. If there are any free blocks that can be used to relocate data, those are used instead since this is both faster (no read/write cycle), and aids wear leveling a bit by not writing to a previously written to block. How we determine which blocks to target and how we target them is strictly proprietary.

Of course, this is a very simplistic description of the rules that govern the behavior of the algorithm because the behavior described operates within the context of growing out the largest consolidated free space chunk and not wholly consolidating all free space. Thus, no defragmentation of either free space or files is performed. This is why the primary action is referred to as "growing" free space. Also not to be confused with "freeing up" or "recovering" free space.

This eliminates one flaw in wear leveling and trim in that partially full blocks are not trimmed. Only blocks that are verified as empty are reset by the SSD (based on block boundaries). This means that when organic writes are committed to the device, the wear leveling algorithm has more trimmed blocks to work with. This helps TRIM both restore performance, and the wear leveling algorithm extend the life of the device. (though we do not make a claim on extending the life of devices, this is because it is impractical to inorganically trash every SSD known to man SSDs in our labs - and because not all SSDs are created equal where wear leveling is concerned)

All that said, this solution is designed to allow trim and the wear leveling algorithm on your SSD to do the best job possible – any performance benefits or improved wear leveling are solely the responsibility of the OS and the SSD firmware. In this sense, our SSD optimization pass is in some aspects a prep pass. Going into much more detail than this is not really possible since I think digging deeper would start to delve into proprietary information. We do understand that this annoys people in that there is a general sense that there is not much useful information floating around regarding the mechanics of SSDs and how they should be optimized – but this is a reflection of the fact that SSDs are still really young in the market and things are changing rapidly. I think you'll find that competitors in the SSD hardware market tend to be tight lipped on what they are doing in order to maintain whatever edge they might have over another vendor. Likewise, we closely guard our methods since we have competitors too. Thus, I’m unable to provide details on the full depth of what we do, why we do it, and how. Hopefully the above is sufficient in explaining the general behavior of our SSD optimization pass and the benefits it provides.

Excluded “permanent” files:

The algorithm respects excluded data and works around it. This is true of all things PerfectDisk. Files that are exclusively locked are simply unmovable since we stick to using the system API – thus, illegal moves are not possible with PerfectDisk.

My understanding is that PD will still try to defrag free space, though at the most minimum, in order to make more free blocks available. More free blocks means more speed? Wouldn't I be able to achieve this by having a larger OP space and idling the computer more often?

Anyway, thanks to Erwin for taking the trouble to explain.

I use an app called freespacecleaner. It is free and does the same thing.

But it is "recommended" you defrag (free space consolidation) the disk prior to running it

If anybody's still interested, a 64 GB SSD, 27% full, wrote approximately 3 GB of data on a SSD Optimize performed by PD 12. Graphically, this looked just like any other ordinary HDD free space consolidation on the PD GUI.

The data was (again, graphically) split on 2 big chunks of approximately 6.5 GB before the "defrag". These were fused, and I assume that if this defrag would have taken place on a normal HDD, it would have been the same 3 GB moved.

From the details kindly provided by ssd_noob it is my understanding that optimizing with PD still has its uses.

It's also very irritating that 1/4 of the message this guy explained the overwhelming importance of guarding Raxco's patents, instead of focusing on the needed details.

If anybody's still interested, a 64 GB SSD, 27% full, wrote approximately 3 GB of data on a SSD Optimize performed by PD 12.

I think 3GB write (27% full) might be quite insignificant to wear out an SSD.

But I doubt whether the performance improvement can be felt in realworld.

Unless there is a more realistic benchmark, I think I will skip this personally.

This guy tells the same story. No improvement. In fact it makes a tad slower.

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1725746

just so we're on the same page, what is idle, to you guys? is it basically leaving windows 7 desktop on while maybe you go watch some tv? how long do you normally idle for? 30 minutes? more? less? ..say for a 120gb ssd.

further, not that i use one, but i assume screen savers should be disabled for this.