Cerberus.Chalkoutline said:
»Aye, defrag operations are taboo with SSD's. I couldn't tell you the technical details as to why, but that's something I remember being warned about when I got my first SSD earlier this year. I reinstalled Win7 a couple days ago, and Windows automatically turned off the defrag scheduling for the SSD, while leaving it on for the 2 internal HDD's I also have. You might want to verify that it's turned off for you.
Along the lines of never defragging an SSD drive, the reason why disk/platter drives were defragged in the first place was because when small and large files would take up space on a sector, then deleted, you'd get a lot of spaces between sectors on a disk that would clog the way for large files. This would force large files to be moved to a more open part of the disk. Typically programs want to have all of their files adjacent to each other so that when disk reads occur, the disk head doesn't have to seek to a new section of the hard drive(the most time consuming part of disk reading, think of a CD or a Vinyl disk head moving from the inside to the far outside. The second most time consuming is the rotation of the disk itself, rated in RPM).
Solid state drives don't have this kind of issue since it's all done without a disk head or platter and no moving parts. It's more or less just an electrical signal going through your drive. This means that you can access one sector of the disk then hop to the "other end" of the disk with no increase in time. Opposed to a disk seek on an platter hard drive, which has to move the disk head and wait for the rotation of the disk to get in range of the sectors it needs to retrieve. So files and even parts of files can be spread all throughout the disk. Since solid state drives have a limited number of writes before the sector becomes un-writeable, work is being done to optimise the sectors written to, which means your files and parts of your files are located all over the disk with no regard to adjacency. Since defragging operations mean lots writes and rewrites while moving files around - so on an SSD, you're just slowly killing your drive.
On a side note, even when using the non-solid state hard drives, I don't recommend taking special action to defragging it. Most newer operating systems will deal with this in the background without any additional programs or actions.
As far as space goes, greater space doesn't equal greater efficiency, as has been mentioned. It just gets to a point, like the recommended 20%, where things do start to get busy and data has to be replaced instead of just written.