Defragging the iPod

[cutefangs]

Just wondering if there's any point, any harm, anything to defragging the iPod through Windows XP.

[ryran]

yes, no, yes.

in practice, if you just tend to use any jukebox as a big archive of your music (as in, you mostly just keep adding more things), the hard drive isn't going to get very fragmented. have a look yourself (analyze button).

[Yotto]

However, if you do a massive reorganizing (Like take your songs that are all in one directory and move them to their own directories by artist/album/whatever) then, when you are totally done and ready to use your iPod as just an archive of all your music, you should probably defrag.  It shouldn't hurt anything if you do it a couple times in your iPod's entire life cycle .

[mnhnhyouh]

However defragging is a long and HD intensive process. Much better to just delete everything, and copy it back on.

Then the files will not be fragmented, and the HD wont be working for as long.

h

[Deano]

I would have thought that running a disk intensive process, like a Scandisk or Defrag on an external hard drive like the iPod's would not be good for it. Simply put, the heat that is likely to be generated by the drive during the process *may* be more detrimental to the overall disk than leaving it fragmented.

I have noticed no particular performance drops in playing music without doing a defrag, so I fail to see the point in doing one.

[Yotto]

I only did it once, and wasn't paying any attention because I hadn't given any of this any consideration whatsoever, but I'm almost positive that when I ran the defrag on my iPod, it took a significantly shorter amount of time tahn it would take to pull all the mp3s off of the drive and then put them back on.  Like 10 minutes or so.  I was planning on doing another one soon (I have about 500 more songs to hand-tag and put in the correct directories, and I'll be done with, hopefully, the last major music restructuring of my life), and will report on it.

[mnhnhyouh]

With the iRiver H3xx series, defragging speeds boot times under the iRiver firmware.

http://www.misticriver.net/showthread.php?t=12074

I dont deny there may be advantages to having an unfragmented drive. However using the defragment option is a slow one. Just to copy the music across to an empty drive will give you the same result (a defragmented drive) more quickly, and with less chance of damage/wear.

h

[soap]

If you retag all your music (maybe by adding ReplayGain tags for example) and by doing so increase the filesize of your songs enough to require a new sector to be allocated...then you will have fragmented the heck out of your player, and the one-time investment of defragging will pay you back in reduced drive (and battery!) usage.

But in general, as was previously said, it is hard to fragment something as static as a digital audio player, and even harder to fragment it enough to matter.

[travishayes89]

i might defrag it becuase ive been moving stuff around and retagging some, need to defrag it anyway, i use my iPod as dual purpose, music player and storage device.