Defragging Sansa E200 series in Vista

[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.

[j8048188]

if you REALLY INSIST on defragging your sansa in Vista, make sure you have sp1 installed.  it allows you to choose which volume you wish to defragment.

[Angus_NB]

...

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.

My comment was general pertaining to every day use.  For music/video recording and large graphics work a clean defragged drive is noticeably faster and more reliable.  A dedicated drive is best for this type of work.

I agree, this topic belongs on another forum. 

[kaxx]

Hmmm, excellent info. I defrag my Hard Drives constantly (At Least twice weekly) and had no idea I was doing them basically no good.

I'm glad I asked here, the flash drive formatting being damaging makes sense after you all explained it so I shall never do it again. Thanks for the tips/info.

[ThaCrip]

about the defragging stuff...

yeah like they said above defraging anything flash related is pretty much useless cause even though it appears to windows as being fragmented ... to the drive itself it randomly writes out to different parts so it extends the life of the flash drive instead of acting like a hard drive and just writing to the first part and 2nd part and so on in order like a hard drive pretty much works.

but as far as hard drive defraging ... i use a free program called JKDefrag ... but anyways i think defraging a hard drive periodically (maybe 1 time per month or quarterly (every 3 months or so)) cant be a bad thing especially if your deleting and adding files to the hard drive at the same time as that can fragment stuff fairly bad in a case like that.

but in general i would probably recommend say after you formatted your pc (i.e. clean install of windows) and get all your basic programs installed... i would do a defrag of the hard drive and then after that do one about 1 time per 3months or so.