SSDs are generally so fast that you should do a secure erase only if the drive has been operating close to full capacity for quite a while, or you’re noticing a significant degradation in performance, which is rare these days. This erases all data on the drive, but can bring back the drive’s out-of-box performance. Samsung’s Magician software and its secure erase feature. We never seem to get quite the same numbers after testing and a secure erase, but we get much closer than after a simple TRIM. Or at least as close to it as you’ll ever get. Type CMD into the search Windows field, then right-click on Command Prompt to reveal that option.įor an SSD, a secure erase deletes all the data, but also zeroes the lookup tables and takes the drive back to its virgin, out-of-the-box performance. Note: If you run CMD/CHKDSK and you get a permissions error, you’ll need to run CMD as Administrator.

You can do the same thing under Drive Properties. Running CMD as administrator, CHKDSK is still a handy way to check drives after a power failure. You can scan or Chkdsk an SSD (right-click a drive letter, then select Drive Properties > Tools > Check), so long as you don’t scan sectors, which again, due to the way SSDs operate-is nothing but a waste of time and write cycles. So much so, that Windows generally lets you know when you need to do it. They are very useful after system crashes, blue screens of death, and the like. The Scan drive command and CHKDSK (the command-line variant) are another matter. And most of the time it’s external media that may have been removed before writes were finished. Microsoft is telling the truth, if there’s hardly ever any need to check for errors anymore. Attempts to defrag do nothing but use up precious write cycles (sometimes as few as 1,000), prematurely aging the SSD. SSDs work in an entirely different manner from hard drives spreading data over multiple channels to multiple chips. Should you not take our advice, there’s major caveat-NEVER defrag an SSD. Additionally, the last few iterations of Windows automatically take care of what little defragging or optimization is required.

Back in the days of FAT, DOS, and slow 80MB hard drives, there was a noticeable uptick in performance after a defrag.

Apple defrag hard drive