Computer Memory

Conventional wisdom states that running a defragmentation program on a Solid State Drive (SSD) can cause serious damage. However, this is not very likely to happen to a modern SSD. It was good advice back in the day when SSDs had more limited endurance for being written on than that of modern evolutions of the same hardware, but not so now in the modern era of computing. Current SSDs on the market will typically be IOPs (Input/output Operations Per Second) Limited, which makes them far less prone to this kind of damage.

Why Would you Defrag’ an SSD anyway?
You don’t necessarily have to be the one instigating a defragmentation of your SSD, as it could be part of your system’s own scheduled maintenance. It’s a particularly helpful process for Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), as over time, data becomes fragmented and worsens the performance of your CPU. This doesn’t apply to SSDs however, as they don’t work in the same way as HDDs, but it is nice to know that should it happen automatically or by accident, that no lasting damage will occur as a result.

Potential Damage from a Defrag’
The newly found robustness of modern SSDs means that a huge amount of writes and deletes are required to even come close to causing damage to the hardware. Your SSD would have to be processing a colossal amount of data for the unlikely occurrence of a catastrophic failure due to defragmentation to become a reality. Even if you run defrags in the normal way, your SSD hardware is still likely to outlast every other component of your laptop or desktop PC.

Maintaining Your SSD
Whilst defragging isn’t an appropriate method of maintenance for an SSD, there are steps you can take to ensure good performance. A good start would be to disable indexing, which is used by Windows Search to keep track of all of your files stored on your laptop or desktop PC. The write operations involved will slowly degrade the performance of your SSD and Windows Search will work just fine without it, so it’s best to turn it off. You could also enable your Trim report to further enhance its operation.

The Future
Solid State Drives truly do represent the future when it comes to how a computer uses non-volatile storage and there may come a point when they will replace them entirely. This is because of a number factors, not least of which is the fact that whilst RAM and CPUs are getting faster and better performing, the magnetic spinning disk method of data storage is beginning to fall behind, technologically speaking.

Mushkin Inc is a business most noted for the production of memory module hardware for use in personal computers. The company has its base in Pflugerville, in Mid-Texas U.S.A. and has industry and avid gamers as part of its main target audience. Its most notable clients have included NASA and Apple Incorporated.

The products Mushkin has created have not been limited to memory components, however, as they have significant experience in producing power supply units, Solid State Drives (SSDs) and USB flash drives. Both volatile and non volatile memory have been mass produced by the company, with their ‘REDLINE’ line of RAM proving popular with gamers who tend to ‘overclock’ their memory for a better level of performance.

Origins
The company was created in 1994 when William Mushkin started supplying memory hardware to Apple Macintosh from its Denver base. After establishing itself on the market over the next 5 or so years, Mushkin Inc was consumed as part of a merger with Ramtron International and more specifically, its subsidiary company, Enhanced Memory Systems in the year 2000. 

Many thought this would be the end for Mushkin, but just 5 years later, George Stathakis bought the company back from Ramtron and went on to be the owner/president of the restored Mushkin Inc. For reasons of expansion and finding a more suitably large area for all aspects of Research and Development, assembly, manufacturing, Stathakis and his board decided to move the company to Colorado, to a newly formed tech centre in Englewood. The site had 50% more space for production, almost 50% more office real estate and 35% more R&D space.

Pflugerville, Texas
The company now known as Mushkin Enhanced MFG (to give it its full title), resides in Pflugerville, not far from Austin, Texas. The company has become synonymous with high performance computer components and has a long and distinguished past, having had great working relationships with giants like LSI, NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, as well as a host of different retail channels around the globe. They are also known as a company with some of the best customer support around.

Innovators
There have been a number of major contributors in the field of digital data storage and Mushkin can count itself amongst them. Focusing as they do on cutting edge technologies and the very best performing memory hardware for laptops, servers and desktop computers. Right now, they remain at the leading edge of memory technology, boasting a range of solid state drives, NAND flash devices, and Random Access Memory.