Should I defragment my USB Flash drive?

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Hmmmm... makes me wonder how many MacBook Air owners may defrag their new SSD drives, potentially reducing the lifespan of the device. Using Flash for hard drives (Solid State Drives) is still an expensive, limited storage medium that is slowly gaining momentum. As more manufacturers (such as Samsung) throw their weight behind the technology we should see lower prices and increased capacities. The next couple of years could yield some very interesting drives in this arena - low power consumption, fast boot times, and potentially better performance that disk based drives.

The magnetic hardrive is a -mechanical- device that is, by orders of magnitude, the slowest* component in a modern PC of which all other components are solid state (CPU, RAM, GFX etc). File fragmentation increases the work that this mechanical device has to do, thereby worsening an existing performance bottleneck. Hence the need for defragmentation. In addition to preserving overall system performance, defragmentation may also improve the life of the drive in the long term, improve chances of file recovery (if the HDD crashes) and a defragmented drive may also reduce battery consumption in laptops. Infact, in the corporate space, unattended intelligent automatic defrag of workstations and servers is becoming the norm since it eases the workload of the IT people yet reduces user complaints of poor performance.

However, as Leo has so precisely explained, flash drives derive none of the benefits of defragmentation that are applicable to mechanical HDDs. So, there is no use defragging your thumb drive or ipod nano.

IMO, even with the rising popularity of SSDs, there is still a long way to go before they can seriously threaten the trusty magnetic-mechanical workhorse in our homes. As of now, the SSDs simply cannot compete on the price to performance ratio for home users.

* Excluding optical drives, that are infact even slower, but are only of peripheral interest (pun unintended) compared to a HDD.

"Hmmmm... makes me wonder how many MacBook Air owners may defrag their new SSD drives, potentially reducing the lifespan of the device."

Fortunately for OSX users, fragmentation isn't much of a problem. HFS+ (the standard file system for MAC users) uses a combination of methods to reduce fragmentation.Such as aggressive read ahead and write behind caching, journaling, and delayed allocation. not to say that files don't get fragmented, but there is much less of a performance hit from the few files that do get scattered across the drive.

That being said, great tip. Never, ever, ever defrag a SSD.

Connie Ramirez -
In the May 1, 2008 edition of Windows Secrets several anti-virus programs were evaluated. The results were obtained from Virus Bulletin's April 2008 edition and tested 37 antivirus solutions. The tests were run on Windows Vista PCs and included a list of viruses known to be circulating in the wilds of the Internet as of January 2008: worms, bots, polymorphic viruses, file infector viruses, and even legacy virus strains.

Five products notched perfect 100% detection rates (prices include one year of virus-signature updates): Avira Antivir Personal (free for noncommercial use), ESET NOD32 ($40), Fortinet FortiClient ($28), Frisk FPROT Antivirus ($29 for up to five PCs), and Symantec Norton Antivirus ($40).

You can install and register free copies of Avira on each of your 4 computers from www.free-av.com. Understand that AV products seem to change rankings with each other depending on latest updates, test authorities, etc. As Leo has said many times, better to use something rather than nothing at all.

http://ask-leo.com/whats_the_best_popup_blocker_antivirus_software_antispyware_software.html

interesting article leo, i totally agree about the wearing out of flash/solid state storage.

But i have been testing numerous SD and micro SD cards and the read/write benchmarks show a noted improvment after a defrag! how can this be explained?

@ Henry Cossak:
You might be noticing a performance increase in regards to file writes; it's been proven to my personal satisfaction that writing to fragmented free space will be slower than writing to contiguous free space. The bigger the file being written, the bigger the performance impact. No noticable difference in read time, though.

Personally, I defrag my heavily written flash drives once every 6 months or so.

I have an ocz 64gb SSD, which when new windows reported as 56GB. everytime I do a diskclean up I lose space not gain it. Last time I checked it I found I had 26GB installed inclunding hidden system file. 56-26 = 30GB of free space, but windows reported it as 20GB. I had lost 10GB over a few weeks. I decided to defrag the drive and got all the space back. Is this a windows or drive problem. Vista 64bit btw.

Actually, defragging your flash drive can have some benefit but only if your hardware needs it. For example, the CycloDS and many other MicroSD to DS adapters require the card to be mostly unfragmented to work properly. There is even a debate on the official forums about whether it is best to use a defragmenting program or to simply copy everything off, reformat, and restore everything.

Facinating. I did not know that they can wear out. I thought that they would work until some catastrophic failure, like a static spike or chip failure would render the whole device useless. What are the symptoms? Should they just be disposed of after a certain time?

Leo, I saw your article about flash drives not necessarily needing defragmentation. I have a 750 gig maxtor usb I use for storing my Norton Ghost backups. After doing a backup, my 750 gig shows to be 99% fragmented. Running XP Defrag program takes up to 6 days running continuously. After it has been defragged, it's time of my next weekly backup with norton ghost, and I'm back to square one...it's 99% fragmented again. Is this a problem leaving it this fragmented, or is there a better and faster way to defrag the 750 gig?

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