Defragmentation of USB Flash Drives

Is it a bad practice to routinely defrag USB Flash Drives?

Years ago I read that the more 'writes' to a USB Flash Drive, the shorter the Drive Life.

Thanks In Advance.

 

Since USB Flash drives are not rotationally moving devices, there is little difference in the accecss time of a fragmented vs defragmented file.

It is a bad practice to defragment them based on life limited write operations.

 

I found this article:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/usb-drive-life-fact-or-fiction/849

 

Your article is interesting. Nice to know we're not getting ripped off for drive quality.

But as already noted, I would not defrag flash memory drives. The wear leveling built into flash drives may well not allow defragging to work as with a traditional drive. IOW, no benefit but it is possible it could cause unneeded wear...

 

I agree that traditional defragmentation such as employed with the Built-in defragmenter in Windows as well as most 3rd party solutions should not be used on USB Flash or SSD type of storage. 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.

 

Haahaha! 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.. well.. if it makes you feel good then go ahead and spend time and money on it. But you won't see any performance change. You'll just shorten the lifespan.

The key thing that needs to be understood about working with flash based storage is that you have two file maps. One done by the o/s and the other by the device itself. While utilities will indeed arrange things on the o/s map. The drive still has it's own internal map and you can't play with that. That's a low-level operation.