Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

Defragging Sansa E200 series in Vista

(1/2) > >>

kaxx:
Sorry if this has been asked before, if I'm in the wrong thread here, or the wrong forum for that matter but I'm curious if anyone knows how to do this (or if it is even possible). I've read that it may help the disk read speed by a slight little bit, but when I open up defrag there is no option for defragging the Sansa. I used to do this all the time in WinXP.

Edit: Seems Vista doesn't even recognize it as a drive like XP did, but rather as a "Portable Device" so I'm not expecting a yes to this answer.

I'm currently running Vista Ultimate 64 bit. I have a love/hate relationship with it ATM, but it's getting better......

Thanks

Kaxx

saratoga:
Put it in UMS mode if you want to defrag.

However defragmenting a flash disk pointless.  Sectors are randomly accessed, so putting them in order doesn't accomplish anything.

Angus_NB:
Defragging a solid state drive does more damage than good.  You will never see a speed increase.  All you are doing is shortening the life of the memory.  Flash memory has a finite number of write cycles.  De-fragmentation of the drive writes to the drive more than you would in a year.  :)
Even mechanical hard drives in todays computers don't really benefit from defragging.  You may be able to measure a speed difference using diagnostic software but you will never actually see a difference in daily use.  Again all you are doing is shortening the life of the drive.

Llorean:
This is true for Rockbox: Defragging is unlikely to create reasonable benefits. On Flash it's flat out damaging, on HDs it's not really bad but there are few cases where your files are likely to be fragmented significantly since they're mostly small anyway, and you probably shouldn't be deleting and writing new files a lot.

But the statements about fragmented disks only causing measurable performance degradation in diagnostic tools is something to be debated somewhere else. I know that badly fragmented disks have cause measurable startup time differences in applications for me, so I know that within my personal experience the statement is absolutely untrue, but any real discussion of it can be handled on other forums to that intent.

Edit: It's been noted that having a defragmented drive (on HD targets) is beneficial for recording, as it's possible to experience buffer underruns if fragmentation is too bad.

Strife89:
Older, slower HDDs will benefit from periodic defrags. :)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page