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Cross-utilization?

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crabby3:
Could a cell phone, or a tablet, be used to defrag a flash-drive?

Similar to using a separate VHS rewinder instead of the VHS recorder?

ConstanceJill:
Wait, what's the point to defrag a flash drive anyway?

I mean, it's not like fragmentation really has any effect on access times for non-mechanical drives... so unless perhaps you plan on making partitions on that drive… ?_?

However, if you still want an answer then: "Sure, why not? As long as you have a defrag program that can run on those devices and access the usb drives..."

wraith808:
Wait, what's the point to defrag a flash drive anyway?

-ConstanceJill (November 04, 2016, 06:36 PM)
--- End quote ---

You never want to defrag a flash drive.  Flash memory wears out.  And defragging uses up reads and writes from the flash drive's lifetime.

MilesAhead:
Wait, what's the point to defrag a flash drive anyway?

-ConstanceJill (November 04, 2016, 06:36 PM)
--- End quote ---

You never want to defrag a flash drive.  Flash memory wears out.  And defragging uses up reads and writes from the flash drive's lifetime.
-wraith808 (November 04, 2016, 09:57 PM)
--- End quote ---

You certainly would not want to shuffle the clusters around.  If anything you might copy the entire drive to another storage, erase the flash drive, then copy back on file by file.  Do benchmarks before and after to see if it makes any difference whatsoever.  In general usage I bet not.  But perhaps in some funky DB application you might get a nanosecond here and there.  It would be interesting to find out.

Vurbal:
Defragging only makes sense on a physical drive because of the moving parts, ie the time it takes to move from one physical location on the platter to another. On a flash drive the problem is not physical movement, but rather the limited number of reads and writes before it wears out. A properly designed flash drive intentionally fragments data to avoid using the same addresses over and over.

In fact, I wouldn't expect the physical locations of the addresses, nor would I assume they were physically contiguous.

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