Defraging before cloning hard drives

[moallen]

Recently I cloned a 120GB SSD over to a 500GB HDD, because I needed more storage. The new HDD ran ok but was very slow. I discovered it was badly fragmented. After defragging, it ran normal.

I know SSD's don't arrange data like HDD's and therefore don't need defragging like a HDD nor are the extra writes good for the SSD.

This leads to a 2 part question. Should a HDD be defragged "before" cloning to a SSD?

Assuming it would not do any good to defrag a SSD before cloning it to a HDD, would it be normal for the HDD to end up badly fragmented afterwards?

 

[Ian]

Welcome to the forums moallen .

Fragmentation is a non-issue on an SSD, as you've already mentioned - so there's no point in pre-defragging when going from HDD > SSD.

When you go the other way (SSD > HDD), it's quite usual for there to be fragmentation - but Windows will handle this during a weekly scheduled task. That said, there's no harm in giving it a manual run after moving the data to speed things up initially.