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werpu · 04-26-2009, 08:14 AM

Dont defrag a flash disk like it is in the sony ebook reader.
I want to give a short explanation what fragmentation is and why it is pointless and even dangerous in such devices.
Fragmentation simply means that data is spread in blocks all over the storage. Now this is a huge isse for a harddisk which has a mechanical head spinning over the disk having to read and write the data. Every head move is time lost to the data reading. But in electronical devices with flash disks you dont have any mechanical part so defragmentation does not help at all, what you gather is a psychological placebo effect. It is even worse, defragmentation means serious write cycles you add to the disk, and flash disks only have a limited number of write cycles until single memory cells fail. So putting a heavy write load onto the disk might damage it in the long run...

04-26-2009, 08:14 AM	#6
werpu Junior Member Posts: 5 Karma: 18 Join Date: Apr 2009 Device: none	Fair Warning Dont defrag a flash disk like it is in the sony ebook reader. I want to give a short explanation what fragmentation is and why it is pointless and even dangerous in such devices. Fragmentation simply means that data is spread in blocks all over the storage. Now this is a huge isse for a harddisk which has a mechanical head spinning over the disk having to read and write the data. Every head move is time lost to the data reading. But in electronical devices with flash disks you dont have any mechanical part so defragmentation does not help at all, what you gather is a psychological placebo effect. It is even worse, defragmentation means serious write cycles you add to the disk, and flash disks only have a limited number of write cycles until single memory cells fail. So putting a heavy write load onto the disk might damage it in the long run...