Defrag Your USB Drive - Yes or No?
- 2
- Add a Comment
I recalled several months ago one of the loyal readers, I believe it was Don Naphen, who asked whether defrag a USB drive would improve performance. I responded that to defrag of a USB drive was not necessary which I still feel is correct. But during the past several months I have read in some of the forums that folks are recommending to defrag USB drives. With this in mind I thought I would post the question and see what everyone thinks.
Here is my take of why USB drives do not need to be defragged. First of all fragmented files on a hard disk is casued by the read write head banging all over the hard disk. In a USB drive there is no mechanical arm and fragmented files can be found quickly no matter how they are stored. Next is the limited life of a USB drive. If you defrag a USB you may actually shorten the life of the drive itself.
So there you have it. Defrag or not - you decide.
Give us your opinion on what you think is correct for a USB drive.
Comments welcome.
[tags]usb, defrag, yes, no, mechanical, wear, out, [/tags]
2 Comments
NewJohnny
February 26th, 2008
at 11:56am
This is not opinion, it’s fact: usb drives should not be defragged. It’s an entirely different technology from mechanical hard drives. It’s not even relevant.*
*This doesn’t apply to programs that require contiguous files, but these are rare.
Nehalem
February 27th, 2008
at 11:03am
I agree. The magnetic hard disk benefits from defragmentation because the mechanical work and time to read a file is reduced, thereby improving it’s performance. Defragmentation may also improve the life of the HDD in the long run, thereby staving off premature replacement costs. In an enterprise environment it can reduce the number of complaints of poor performance from non-techie users, etc etc. (No surprise why automatic defrag is becoming the norm these days!)
A solid state drive has NO moving parts. It is NOT mechanical. So defragmentation will definitely not help performance or hardware life in any way. Ironically, it may actually reduce the life of a SSD because of the limited number of write cycles of the data storage material. So, don’t bother defragging a SSD, you’ll only waste time and make things worse.