Should Flash Drives Be Defragmented?
Although flash drives (and all flash memory for that matter) can be defragmented, there is no purpose to doing so. Flash memory does not gain the same improvement in performance that defragmentation of a traditional hard drive provides.
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How Hard Drives Work
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Hard drives consist of hard metallic platters, which store magnetic data, and an actuator arm that moves across the platters to read and write information on the hard drive.
What is Fragmentation?
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Sometimes files on a hard drive, which consist of many small chunks of magnetic data, get separated from one another. When this happens, a file is considered fragmented, and the actuator arm must move over more surface area to read the file, making file access times slower.
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Why Hard Drives are Defragmented
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Defragmentation tells a hard drive to arrange its files in order so that it takes less time to read them.
Why Flash Memory Isn't Defragmented
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Defragmenting a flash memory device (including USB flash drives) will only repeatedly write to the disk, providing no actual benefits to memory performance.
Dangers of Defragmentation for Flash Memory
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Defragmenting flash memory is actually harmful to the memory because each write cycle causes the integrity of components inside flash memory to dwindle. Over time, defragmentation would cause flash memory to stop working.
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References
- Photo Credit Image by Flickr.com, courtesy of christyxcore
