SQ improvement

Technically SSDs have much lower power draw compared to spinning discs. 

I guess less power draw equals less power supply loading thus cleaner power to the rest of the electronics?

SSDs offer greater speed, no fragmentation, create no internal heat or noise, and are not subject to vibrations. Based on those factors a perceived SQ increase has merit. I refit my notebook PC with a SSD when the spinning drive failed and will never go back.

I am not sure about fragmentation... that is a manifestation of the file system not the technology... my SSDs need de fragmenting from time to time... also my SSDs can run quite hot when working... but I agree about the no vibrations and moving parts.

I'm running Windows 8.1 which supports TRIM command and everything I've ever read on-line indicates defragmenting a SSD (via third-party software) offers no realistic speed advantage and potentially reduces the longevity of the SSD. As far as heat, my PC's internal fan comes on far less with the SSD and battery life is improved.

Once per month Windows does a real full defrag, also on a SSD, to optimize the internal meta data.

Here is what Microsoft say about the SSD defrag:

Storage Optimizer will defrag an SSD once a month if volume snapshots are enabled. This is by design and necessary due to slow volsnap copy on write performance on fragmented SSD volumes. It’s also somewhat of a misconception that fragmentation is not a problem on SSDs. If an SSD gets too fragmented you can hit maximum file fragmentation (when the metadata can’t represent any more file fragments) which will result in errors when you try to write/extend a file. Furthermore, more file fragments means more metadata to process while reading/writing a file, which can lead to slower performance.

As far as Retrim is concerned, this command should run on the schedule specified in the dfrgui UI. Retrim is necessary because of the way TRIM is processed in the file systems. Due to the varying performance of hardware responding to TRIM, TRIM is processed asynchronously by the file system. When a file is deleted or space is otherwise freed, the file system queues the trim request to be processed. To limit the peek resource usage this queue may only grow to a maximum number of trim requests. If the queue is of max size, incoming TRIM requests may be dropped. This is okay because we will periodically come through and do a Retrim with Storage Optimizer. The Retrim is done at a granularity that should avoid hitting the maximum TRIM request queue size where TRIMs are dropped.

Defraging SSD or HDD used solely for music storage is unlikely to be either relevant or make any difference for most people, because most commonly they are simply added to, with very little deletion, therefore on the whole the music files are unlikely to be fragmented. (Different of course for anyone who does often delete things, or if the drive is shared with other storage that may be.)

Music is seldom deleted from my collection but the editing of meta data may possibly lead to unexpected fragmentation but the access speed and data transfer rate should be more than sufficent to compensate for any noticeable performance degradation. The current storage devices have data transfer rates that can range from 200 MB/s to 2,500 MB/s which means they can transfer the average music file in less than a second. There is the possibility that the access speed and data transfer rate are more important than whether the device is HDD or SSD.

Minh Nguyen posted:

Music is seldom deleted from my collection but the editing of meta data may possibly lead to unexpected fragmentation but the access speed and data transfer rate should be more than sufficent to compensate for any noticeable performance degradation. The current storage devices have data transfer rates that can range from 200 MB/s to 2,500 MB/s which means they can transfer the average music file in less than a second. There is the possibility that the access speed and data transfer rate are more important than whether the device is HDD or SSD.

Good point, relevant if people edit the metadata when on the drive, and that may apply if ripping on a Core - otherwise some people at least edit on a computer and only transfer to their music store once happy with it.

The amount of RAM that a device has may also have a significant impact on performance. The more RAM a device has the more it can cache to high speed memory and make the device more responsive. A multi-core 64 bit CPU could possibly improve upon that of lower specification.

I personally don't think fragmentation is an issue and as somebody pointed out windows itself has a capability which u can run once in a while to defragment.

but I think the main advantage of ssd is the lack of moving parts and fan - which having used a very noisy laptop I can see a very clear advantage.

also I use an external hd for my music - I don't have it on my laptop itself. but even with this there are now ssd external harddrives which are available but quite expensive but might become cheaper down the road.