Can you defrag a flash drive

They can cause problems with performance overhead as well as reduce the life span of the storage media. Condusiv Technologies, formerly Diskeeper Corporation on the other hand has developed specific technologies ntelliWrite and HyperFast to overcome these issues by preventing the vast majority of fragmentation from occuring in the first place.

Their technologies have proven to reduce the erase write activity, thereby increasing Flash drive longevity as well as improve performance. HowardB , Mar 6, Joined: Jan 13, Posts: 1, That's just too funny. And ridiculous..

A modern day flash based device does quite a bit of internal re-writing as you use the disk. A modern day SSD becomes severely fragmented internally within weeks of using it. Nature of the best. Any file placement strategy or free space consolidation done by 3rd party utilities and optimizers is totally unnecessary.. But you won't see any performance change. You'll just shorten the lifespan. How to regain computer hard drive space. How to delete a partition in Windows.

Can you get files and data after a hard drive is reformatted? What is the difference between a quick format and a full format? Technology in terms you understand. Sign up for the Confident Computing newsletter for weekly solutions to make your life easier. Click here and get The Ask Leo! Defragmenting a hard drive makes sense to me because the hard drive read arm has to jump around the disk for fragmented files; but what about flash drives?

In my opinion, you should never defragment a drive based on solid state memory. Become a Patron of Ask Leo! Many machines now come with SSDs as their primary disks, and one of the cheapest approaches to speeding up an older machine is to replace its older mechanical hard disk with an SSD.

Also, SSDs are typically designed to be a component installed in your computer, like a traditional hard drive. Defragging a solid state drive will typically gain no performance benefits 2. Writing to the flash memory used in SSDs and thumb drives causes it to degrade ever so slightly. Reading does not. And the technology continues to improve almost daily. Defragmenting a drive is all about moving the data around on the drive. That means reading it from one location and writing to another.

Whatever the expected lifespan of the device, you could easily be cutting it in half, or worse. For no benefit. So defrag your hard drives every so often, but never defrag your flash drives. Windows will note that you have a solid state drive and actually not allow you to defragment it. At least not without a proper backup of its contents … which you should do anyway.

And yes, I took a sacrificial thumb drive and defragmented it. The defragmenting operation shortened its life. It will fail sooner, and without warning. Subscribe to Confident Computing! Download right-click, Save-As Duration: — 7. Silver-level patrons have access to this related video from The Ask Leo! Video Library. Emphasis on slight. Fair enough. Use a good backup strategy instead. 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. 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. Such as aggressive read ahead and write behind caching, journaling, and delayed allocation. Connie Ramirez — In the May 1, edition of Windows Secrets several anti-virus programs were evaluated. 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 worms, bots, polymorphic viruses, file infector viruses, and even legacy virus strains.

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. The bigger the file being written, the bigger the performance impact. No noticable difference in read time, though. 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.