Hard drives need defragmentation to ensure pieces of data are stored in contiguous cells, preventing longer seek times. SSDs, on the other hand, store data a bit differently than HDDs. Flash storage ...

Luckily, there are a few ways to monitor your SSD’s health using SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) built into storage devices and software utilities that interface with it.

SSDs are now the most common type of hard drive in both laptops and desktop PCs. They’re compact, they’re quite, and they outperform traditional hard drives by a mile — but they also tend to slow down ...