Defrag

alwyn1 · Occasional Visitor Joined: Feb 04, 2006 Posts: 22

I've noticed that when my 920 is plugged into the PC and I check the C drive to see how fragmented it is( after a session of removing stuff) the 920 shows up as well as the C drive.
I've refrained from running defrag on the 920 but would it hurt it if I did? Or even would it defrag?

dhn · Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 12:09 pm Post subject:

Do not believe you gain anything trying to defrag flash memory. Would not bother ...
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David

bensonboo · Regular Visitor Joined: Feb 18, 2008 Posts: 65

I won't claim it speeded it up, but I have defragged my OneXL a couple of times and it certainly didn't do any harm.

falkirk81 · Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 9:49 pm Post subject:

Why wouldn't you gain anything by defragmenting flash memory? I defrag my 520 weekly. Surely the info is read sequentially, thus fragmentation may occur? Doesn't do any harm anyway, and the amount of correction data i add, and the updating of POI`s means i do get fragmentation.

If you don't believe me, do an analysis of the flash drive. Mine regularly shows up with files split into pieces over the 520.
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Tomtom GO 1005 LIVE

iPhone 12

Mullet · Frequent Visitor Joined: Dec 12, 2005 Posts: 1051

The speed gained by defragging a hard disk is achieved by sorting the stored data so that the mechanical actuator arm spends less time travelling across the disk platters to access data from different areas.

Since flash does not have any mechanical parts, defragging will yield minimal speed benefits.

Darren · Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 10:24 pm Post subject:

Consensus is that this is bad for flash memory because it has a finite read/write life cycle. Defraging involves a lot of writing and so by doing so you are reducing its working life.

Also, flash memory is not accessed by a single read/write head as a hard disk drive is and so the need for files to be contiguous is not relevant here. Any speed improvement that would result from having all files located contiguously would be immeasurably small.
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Darren Griffin

carl_the_cobbler · Frequent Visitor Joined: Jul 22, 2007 Posts: 251

That is exactly the same as what they say on Techworld.com in a 2005 article.

Defragging makes no real sense for a Flash Drive.

Darren · Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 11:30 am Post subject:

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