
- #EXTERNAL SOLID STATE HARD DRIVE WILL NOT FORMAT MAC OS X#
- #EXTERNAL SOLID STATE HARD DRIVE WILL NOT FORMAT FULL#
When you delete a file in your operating system, the OS informs the solid-state drive that the file was deleted with the TRIM command, and its sectors are immediately erased. On operating systems that support TRIM, files are deleted immediately.
#EXTERNAL SOLID STATE HARD DRIVE WILL NOT FORMAT FULL#
To prevent this from happening when disposing of a PC or hard drive, people use tools like DBAN or the Drive Wiper tool in CCleaner to overwrite the free space, ensuring it’s full of unusable data. Their sectors are marked as deleted, but until they’re overwritten, the data could be recovered with a file-recovery tool like Recuva. This is important when dealing with mechanical hard drives, as files that are deleted on mechanical hard drives aren’t actually deleted immediately.
#EXTERNAL SOLID STATE HARD DRIVE WILL NOT FORMAT MAC OS X#
Solid-state drives are actually designed to spread data around the drive evenly, which helps to spread out the wear effect - rather than one area of the drive seeing all the writes and getting worn down, the data and write operations are spread over the drive.Īssuming you use an operating system that supports TRIM - Windows 7+, Mac OS X 10.6.8+, or a Linux distribution released in the past three or four years (Linux kernel 2.6.28+) - you never need to overwrite or “wipe” your free sectors. The drive can simply read the data from whatever sectors it resides in. On a solid-state drive, there’s no mechanical movement. If a file’s data is spread out over the drive, the head will have to move around to read all the little pieces of the file, and this will take longer than reading the data from a single location on the drive. On a mechanical hard drive, defragmenting is beneficial because the drive’s head has to move over the magnetic platter to read the data.

What’s more, you won’t see any speed improvements from defragmenting. The storage sectors on an SSD have a limited number of writes - often fewer writes on cheaper drives - and defragmenting will result in many more writes as your defragmenter moves files around. You shouldn’t defragment solid-state drives.
