I saw a reply from Seagate to a person asking if the Momentus XT should be defragmented or not. The moronic offshore tech support email actually said that the user had to replace the drive, because it had been defraged. I’m not joking.

Here’s the alleged email:

” Thank you for your inquiry to Seagate Technical Support. You used defragmentation on drives with partial SSD memory on them. SSD memory isn’t made to be defragmented. Therefore, the memory functionality is unable to properly work now. The drive will therefore have to be replaced.

If you have any additional question, please let us know.”

Okay, time to clear the air on this…

First, the reply from Seagate tech support is dead wrong. Not the first time they’ve given totally wrong info (on the Momentus XT), probably pulled out of somewhere south.

Windows 7 automatically defragment hard drives, on a schedueled basis. The notion that Seagate would ship a drive that would need to be replaced, because of a defrag, is downright insane. Sadly, offshore IT often gives insane replies.

Now, to answer the question, defragmenting is a complex topic in this new era. On traditional HDDs, defragmenting makes sense, it’s just a matter of what you get back. On SSD, defragmenting now doesn’t seem to be the winning tactic (though some optimization algorithms do appear to help at times).

The way Momentus XT caches to the SSD is by taking note of sectors that are accessed the most frequently, and moving them into the SSD. As other sectors are used more, they rise in priority and get moved to the SSD.

So, when you defrag a drive, you do lose the benefit… those sectors in the SSD are now of the wrong parts of the drive.

But, fear not, because eventually, the new “most used” sectors will rise back up, and climb to the point that the SSD portion of the drive re-caches them. That’s why rebooting your computer a few times can result in faster boot times.

Plus defragmenting will still help because most fragmented files won’t reside in the SSD.

Bottom line, defragment your Momentus XT just like you would your hard drive. You may want to defragment a little less often, but you still want to defrag. On Windows, I would suggest only defragmenting when Windows Defragmenter says to, and on Mac I would suggest updating after every major release of Mac OS X.