If I defragment my 8 GB Kingston flash drive, will it decrease its lifetime?
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You should not defrag flash media. First off, there is no benefit. Defragging a traditional magnetic hard drive is beneficial as the actuator arm has to move the heads around the platter to find the data. Defragmenting orders the data on the hard drive, and the actuator arm has to seek (move around) less. However, flash media has no moving parts, therefore is has virtually no seek time. Flash media does wear out though. It takes a long time, with lots of writes to the same location repeatedly. Modern flash drives have a technology called TRIM that minimizes writes to the same location by spreading them around the entire drive. TRIM basically does the exact opposite of what you are trying to do - it fragments the data. In addition to that, most OSs will not let you defragment flash media (for the reasons mentioned above). There may be some 3rd party tools that will bypass the restriction, but it is not a good idea. |
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The Diskeeper program, which has been the best defrag utility, has a optimization module for SSDs, called Hyperfast. It doesn't defrag your SSD-type drives, it optimizes them. |
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It depends on what is on the drive. You will not get any performance increase by defragging a flash-drive, but it will have an impact on data-recovery. On the one hand, flash-memory has a limited number of write cycles, so doing a lot of writing will eventually wear it out. Flash drives, memory cards, and SSDs use tricks like wear-leveling and TRIM to extend the life of the media, but defragmentation tends to cause a large number of writes, which will cause it wear out all the faster. On the other hand, fragmented files are infinitely harder to recover when accidentally deleted, hit by a virus, etc. so keeping your files in a contiguous state (e.g., by defragmenting) will greatly increase the chances of recovery. Therefore, like I said at the start, it depends on what is stored on the drive, how important the files are, how likely you are to need to perform data-recovery, and how frequently the files are changed (frequent deletions and copies will lead to fragmentation faster as well as eat up more write cycles). |
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If you have not yet done it, the answer is, "yes it does, don't do that". However, most likely one defragmentation cycle consumes just 1-5% of the lifespan of the USB stick, so you're hard pressed to notice. The exact amount of wear depends on the controller on the drive, and how badly it was fragmented before defragmenting. The 1-5% estimate comes from assuming defragmenting a badly fragmented drive writes each block 1-5 times, write amplification for cheap NAND flash solutions is around 10-30 and MLC NAND is typically rated at 5-10k cycles. |
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