Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s
...SNIPPED...
Wear leveling is needed because flash memory cells wear out after a number of writes, a smaller number than they would like you to believe. Whenever a file on flash is changed, the flash device copies the entire block containing the change to a never written block and remaps the address to point to that new block. When the device runs out of never written blocks, it has to erase an entire previously written but no longer used block, then write to that. To change even a single bit in a file, the flash needs to read the entire block that has that bit, change that bit, erase an unused block, write the entire changed block and remap it address. Now think what happens when a software application tries to defragment at the file system cluster level.
Fragmentation has no meaning for a flash drive, the block addressing is completely arbitrary. Trying to defragment a flash drive could easily cause every block to be erased and rewritten several times. That is just for the blocks storing the file contents. Just think about the blocks containing the FAT. Those get moved many times in a defragment attempt on a flash drive.
Trying to defragment flash not only does not make data access any faster, it also causes the drive to wear out much sooner.>>>SNIPPED>>>>
|
^ This. Exactly right in my experience, both as professional geek manager and as decades long computer end-user.
Defragging flash drives is a waste of time and can indeed lead to premature failure as j.p.s. so eloquently points out.
I see this exact topic coming up on mp3 player forums as well and the answer is the same for that stuff too.
No benefit to defragging flash drives so why do it?
