Database Users

Defrag Storage Card, Don't Do It.

This is just a quick heads up. It was new to me and I had never came across the issue before on here, so I am posting my results.
I was doing some routine maintenance on my PC and I had accidentally left one of my external USB Stick drives in the machine. I noticed that in the Defrag options, it now gave me an option to Defrag the external drive. I thought to myself, thats kinda cool, I bet my 6gb Micro SD card on my phone could benift from a good defrag. I quickly popped my Micro SD card from my phone, plunked it into a USB Key Reader and told Diskeeper to Defrag the Micro Card. I was thinking, this should be great, I have thousands of files on my Micro Card, a good Defrag should be a cool thing. A few mins later it said it was done so I pulled it out and put it in back in my phone.
The next day I went to launch TomTom and it took 5 mins just to launch the app. I thought it had froze or something. I was fighting with it, driving me nuts. I re-installed TomTom, still taking 5-8mins now to load the app. When I tried to get directions it would take up to a min just to plot a route. (should only take a few seconds) I re-flashed the phone with a new ROM, then reinstalled TomTom and it did not help at all. Everything on the storage card was taking forever to load. Even the music apps were bogging down really badly.
Today, I yanked the Micro Card out of the phone, placed it in a USB key and copied the contents to a temp Dir on my desktop, formated the card, then wrote some data to the card and formated again.
Finally I put all my data from the temp Dir back onto the card and put the card back in my phone. Launched TomTom and took about 5 seconds rather than 5 mins to load. Everything is back to perfect.
I was hoping to Increase speeds with the Defrag of the Micro SD card and in fact it killed it horribly.

Lol, good to know. I would have thought the same thing!

a little common sense would have told you that would be a bad idea.
defragging is designed to 'defragment' files and put the most used files all together at the start of the drive. meaning a hdd head doesn't have to do a lot of skipping about for one file. then yet more skipping to find the next file, and a whole load more skipping to find different pieces of that file, etc etc.
the fact that solid state media doesn't have a drive head renders defragmenting unnecessary, plus as SSDs also have a limited number of write cycles the excessive writing required to move files around the card reduces its lifespan.
hope this helps

It depends
After owning several Pocket PCs with various expansion types, defragging has it's benefits and it's pitfalls.
(The following comments are based on percieved experience. I've not done any benchmarking.)
I've found using cheap card readers can definitely cause problems with cards, particularly when defragging. It can result in various errors in the files and sometimes even render the card unreadable/unwritable. Even reformatting has no effect. To solve the problem I've often had to use a digital camera to reformat the card before it can be read/written by a PC via card reader.
Multi-media files seem to be the type of file that benefits most from a contiguous file that needs to be read/written by the Windows Mobile device. Particularly video. Why this is so, I do not know. But when watching video or listening to audio skipping and stuttering seem to be much less aparent when the file is contiguous. Also, I've been able to resurrect some .jpg files unreadableby my WM device by doing a defrag. Again, no idea why.
Almost any file that needs to be constantly read seems to benefit from a contiguous file, e.g. GPS maps.
Safest way to make files contiguous is to copy the contents of the card to a hard disk, reformat the card, then rewrite to the card.
Just my 2 cents.
Would be interested in anyone else's observations, particularly with media files.

Defragging files on flashcards is pointless - skipping from sector to sector in a row takes as much time as to skip into random sectors...
Frequent writes on cards descrease their lifetime... So that - defragging anything else than hard disks is harmful for media.

maybe unrelated, but is the option "encrypt files in the storage" (or something sounds like that) from within the windows mobile's settings pose any danger? i.e. conflicting with PIM backup files etc.
thanks

Please read
Just found this article

dave852 said:
a little common sense would have told you that would be a bad idea.
defragging is designed to 'defragment' files and put the most used files all together at the start of the drive. meaning a hdd head doesn't have to do a lot of skipping about for one file. then yet more skipping to find the next file, and a whole load more skipping to find different pieces of that file, etc etc.
the fact that solid state media doesn't have a drive head renders defragmenting unnecessary, plus as SSDs also have a limited number of write cycles the excessive writing required to move files around the card reduces its lifespan.
hope this helps
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well said, SD cards and USB drives are flash drives and as so they don't need defragmentation and also as it was mentioned in the quote, it reduces it's lifespan.
Cheers

With Sandisk offering a 5-year limited warranty for their ordinary microSDHC and a 10-year limited warranty on their Ultra microSDHC cards and an expected minimum life of 15 years and maximum of 75 years (according to a Sandisk forum moderator) does it really matter what you do?
With storage memory sizes and formats moving so fast, who expects to keep using these things bought today on a daily basis on 5 or even 10 years' time?

how to defragment your SD card?

a stupid trick: connect your blackstone to the PC in "drive mode", and defragment it from the PC by right-clicking on the disk drive, properties --> tools-->defragment!
...no need of special software...

i knew that it is not reccomended to defragment flash drives/cards

Why would you defrag? No heads to move to the appropriate sector, no gain from defrag.

On other devices i used PocketMechanic very often to defragment cards, repair of loose clusters and such card stuff. Allways without any problem.
But PocketMechanic doesn't work stabil on the HD, be careful!

no moving parts of flash mean seektime is very very low
and as such fragmentation dont slow things down
and flash having a limited number of writes before it dies
like a cd-rw/dvd-rw just more of them
so defragging flash mem lowers it's life because of the writes
and dont speed things up because seektimes is not an issue

memory cards are older than the blackstone!
tons of information on the topic, let's start from the internal one:
http://wiki.xda-developers.com/inde...ocket PC memory cards? Do I need this at all?

I think we may look at memory cards in the same way as a SATA SSD. In this case you can consolidate free space, which is excessively lighter on the writes than an old fashion full defrag.
Software that offers this option is available, and one example is Perfect Disc 10 and 11 (to my experience/knowledge).
So my advise is that if you need to defrag your SD card, which is a type of solid state drive, try to use free space consolidation only. This will be much easier on the wearing of the cells. I'm not quite sure of the P/E specs of SD Cards, or if they provide some wear leveling, but I'm reluctant to believe the latter is provided today for SD Cards like it is for most SATA SSD's.

I think SD card defragmentation is worth it when you have a HUGE and SLOW SD card.
I have a 32Gb SD card (from Kingston) in my Nexus One. I use Google Music Beta, Google Listen and Titanium Backup a lot! Since I reinstall/often upgrade my phone (I'm a geek after all and I'm totally happy!), the Music Beta Cache if often wiped out, I do daily Titanium Backup tasks and at least 3-5 podcasts are downloaded/wiped everyday.
This means a lot of fragmentation is "building up" on my SD card. Since, it is a slow SD, I often experience sluggishness or long load time even after a "fresh" install. The OS must read large files that are splitted on my VERY slow SD card, this does not help!
The problem is to get real numbers to prove this, It is mostly noticeable by navigating through the UI and/or loading some apps.
This was my 2 cents...

Wizcode Defragment

Anyone ever use this utility?? It seems like it would be a great tool to use!!
http://www.wizcode.com/devblog/comments/wizcode_announces_defragment_mobile_beta

talon4x4 said:
Anyone ever use this utility?? It seems like it would be a great tool to use!!
http://www.wizcode.com/devblog/comments/wizcode_announces_defragment_mobile_beta
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Click to collapse
Why don't you install it and give it a shot? Then let us all know how it goes.
By the way, they do have a support forum. Here's a direct link to the Defrag topic -> http://www.wizcode.com/forums/viewforum/35/

It's an excellent utility tool, although one glad to have only when need arises. It is great for scanning the SD card for errors and repairing them, as directory FAT table can causes mayhem when out-of-whack. There's actually two copies of the directory that PMP checks for also.
Finally, as controversial as defragging a SD card can generate, there's no question everything runs faster and smoother done once in a while or after adding/deleting large files.
Handago regularly substancial discounts and Wizcode has 50% off sales.

Looks like mines already too screwed up to be helped

I think I'll hold off until I get a larger card. Right now I only have a 2gb card which isn't big enough for anything so I only have a couple programs installed to it. Which means it probably isn't too heavily fragmented.
Thanks for the info!!

PMP is very picky about defragging ONLY an error-free card. Running the error scan (select repair) even several times until the full report shows 0 errors. Then, the defrag can process.
Mounting the same card in card reader on a PC will very likely also complain about errors or even suggest reformat.

wouldn't it be easier to back up your sd card on your pc the format the card and copy your files back to the sd card.

Directory errors on a 2GB SD card with just music and videos and directory errors on a large 8/16/32GB card with majority of applications, Windows system dll's off-loaded to SD, etc are two entirely different scenarios.
Wiping and reload is obvious solution for one, but much, much more can be at stake grappling with damaged directory data (SD cards have no controllers like CompactFlash, so the directory is all there is).
Even copying a filled 16GB SD card WITHOUT errors to PC folder can be tricky, frustrating experience. Some programs won't transfer. Some lose licenses. I've found copying blocks of data one-at-a-time essential for success, paying particular attention to Application Data, caches, thumbnails and any files made up of minuscule data bits.
It's not the videos that's troublesome, it's system files constantly accessed that can crumble.
Fixing errors BEFORE attempting copying a 16GB SD to new 32GB SD helps a smooth transition, which isn't as rudimentary as would seem.

I don't understand how files get fragmented on a sd. There is no moving parts like a hard drive. I belive there is no gain from trying to defrag a sd card. you are better off checking file intergity than trying to defrag.

bmhome1 said:
Fixing errors BEFORE attempting copying a 16GB SD to new 32GB SD helps a smooth transition, which isn't as rudimentary as would seem.
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That is fixing disk errors not defragmenting. Defragmenting is physically moving pieces of files so they can be accessed faster. sd cards don't pull and dump files like a hard drive they are accessed at locations on the sd. no moving parts so there is really no way for them to get fragmented. Solid state drives work the same way there is no reason to ever defragment a SSD. As always with transfering files there is alway a chance of data loss or corruption weather file integrity is good or bad.

Assassin5150 said:
sd cards don't pull and dump files like a hard drive they are accessed at locations on the sd. no moving parts so there is really no way for them to get fragmented. Solid state drives work the same way there is no reason to ever defragment a SSD.
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That is not true. Fragmentation occurs in solid state memory, same as HDDs. Fragmentation is due to the way the file system works, not because a drive is mechanical or not.
http://www.wizcode.com/articles/comments/flash_memory_fragmentation_myths_and_facts/
Same goes with SSD's. They fragment, and just because there are no mechanical parts, does not mean you will not see a performance drop due to fragmentation.
"It is a misconception that SSD does not suffer from file system fragmentation. . . While this is a significant improvement, mechanical seek time only makes up a part of total access time . . . Zero mechanical seek time certainly does not mean zero I/O time. No matter how fast an SSD can be, its I/O time can never be zero. File system fragmentation affects I/O time in an SSD even when the mechanical seek time is zero."
http://rtcmagazine.com/articles/view/101053

This is a quote fron Intel. Do I need to defragment my Intel® Mainstream Solid-State Drives (using Windows* Disk Defragmenter* or similar program)?
No. SSD devices, unlike traditional HDDs, see no performance benefit from traditional HDD defragmentation tools. Using these tools simply adds unnecessary wear to the SSD. It is recommended that you disable any automatic or scheduled defragmentation utilities for your Intel SSD.
http://www.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/CS-029623.htm#5
Corsair also suggest that defragmenting should not be done as well.
The whole point of defragmenting is to move files on a standard hard drive so they can be accessed faster by the limitations of a mechanical hard drive.

It seems that defragmentation of an SSD from a performance standpoint is debatable.
But you are saying that solid state devices do not create fragments, which is false.

by design they fragment. It's called wear leveling to prevent wear from one sector of the memory block or page. if not it would use one specific block or page over and over causing premature failure. all flash memory and ssd use the same type of wear leveling. Yes defragmenting flash memory or a ssd will not increase performance and will cause more wear doing more harm than help. SSD and flash memory life expectancy is based on a number read/write cycle. That's why I suggested formatting the sd card instead of defragmenting which is nothing but hundreds or thousands read/write cycles.

I did state defragging SD cards IS controversial, but there's more than the standard retort against doing so. Visit the Wizcode statements and THEIR concepts and decide independently, if not only worth doing, but actually beneficial for performance.
It's when one finds a heavily populated SD card that won't even mount on PC desktop anymore, that in fact there's repair solutions available.
PMP is TWO tools: 1st: error detection and repair and 2nd: OPTIONAL defragging.
It's pointless to dismiss a utility without actually using it.

bmhome1 said:
It's pointless to dismiss a utility without actually using it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I can use windows to scan and fix errors on a sd card. There is no bennefit to defragmenting a sd card as I stated just more wear. So I am going to dissmiss a product that someone is trying to sell me that doen't give a real solution to a problem but actually does more harm than good. But it's your money do what you want with it.

What is actually wearing on a card? There's no moving parts like a HDD. Fragmentation can occur on any read/write media. As it gets used, files get deleted (installing and uninstalling programs), moved (photos and music), and other I/O operations that cause things to get scattered. Defragmentation can optimize how things are stored. No, there isn't the problem of the write/read heads jumping all over the disk to find fragmented data, but by defraging the card you limit the space lost from improper cluster size usage.

SSD running an OS and SD storage for 99% PLAYBACK have NO relationship.
Simply, does a 1.5GB video run smoother not broken up into 20 pieces vs one contiguous file? Absolutely, no matter what it's stored on.
That's enough reason alone to have PMP onboard.
It's free, fully functional 30 day trial. It's 2.5MB. It's $7.50 - 15.00 invested after liking enough to buy. What is the issue?!?
Oh, precious write cycles used up. I doubt my 32GB SD won't get retired long, long before 100,000 cycles.
Anyways, I defragged ONCE so far, and don't expect to EVER again...unless mysterious slowdowns creep up.
Then simply run the damn app and find out exactly what it reports and act accordingly...
or blame Win6.5, Sense, card speed or whatever less-informed conclusions to dream up.
Personally, I don't have the time.
Also, anyone who has actually transferred 15GB from SD to PC and back knows how agonizing long the process. And error checking/repair using Windows desktop is equally endless waiting. That is, IF that's an option, what do you do when the SD card can only be reformatted offered?

Miami_Son said:
What is actually wearing on a card? There's no moving parts like a HDD.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Solid state memory is limited to a certain number of read/write cycles before failure (unlike HDD, which can theoretically be re-written infinitely . . . its the mechanical parts that fail). And de-fragging solid state memory actually requires many read-write cycles. Assassin is right about that.
But its controversial how long it will actually take to make an SSD or SD card fail. Some have theorized decades, and even de-fragging it on a regular basis isn't going to make much of a difference. Some claim the life spans of these devices will be much shorter. The formats have not been around long enough to really know.

Just as with hard drives, the greater the FREE space on the SD card starting out, the quicker and less taxing on write cycles. In other words, DON'T wait until your SD card is close to full (at least 10% minimum free space traditionally) and expect defragging to go smoothly and/or fast. The less free space available the more churning processing.
My 32GB card freshly loaded with 15GB from retired 16GB SD and numerous movies (totalling around 17GB) had low level of fragmentation (under 15%) and defragged quickly (five minutes) due to all the free space to shuffle files. The most fragmented file was a 1GB video for some reason. It was hardly a drama event, greatly helped by exceptionally informative GUI during processing.
Pocket Mechanic Pro has been around almost a decade, going back to Win Mobile 2002. It defragged my 2003 iPaq's very, very expensive 4GB SD card too many times to count. That card is still in use today.
The wear cycle concern is blown WAY out of proportion. Since 2001, I've been abusing dozens upon dozens CF, SD, SDHC and microSDHC filling up repeatedly, reformatting, defrag when needed, never a single burp from any (anybody want 32MB CF cards
Ironically, Intel's first SSD launch didn't go so well. The lightning speed fell off a cliff very quickly, due to guess what. Their next-generation SSD revised algorithms addressed slowdowns along with the timely introduction of trim command. This was all in the past year. It's hardly time yet to become didactic regarding SSD's.

Once again..

Nandroid deleted a **** ton of my pictures. this happened when i first rooted and first nandroided on a diff SD card a year ago. i had 1500mb of free space and a nandroid only takes up 600. i check my phone today, i lost 300something pictures that just AREN'T THERE on my sd card anymore.
has this ever happened to anyone before? i'm SO angry right now i can't even think straight. i tried a file restore program a year ago and it couldn't recover the files because they were OVERWRITTEN by the god damn nandroid files.
i would've had 600mb free or so after the nandroid yest..and now i have 2.61 gigs free. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

i actually just ran a file recovery system just to see...and it found a few pics that aren't on my SD card and are just gone now...but i can't save them bc it's an evaluative version. anyone know of any FREE software that can do this?!

I've never had this happen to me. Try this to recover your lost pics http://www.piriform.com/recuva it has worked pretty good for me.

jayochs said:
Nandroid deleted a **** ton of my pictures. this happened when i first rooted and first nandroided on a diff SD card a year ago. i had 1500mb of free space and a nandroid only takes up 600. i check my phone today, i lost 300something pictures that just AREN'T THERE on my sd card anymore.
has this ever happened to anyone before? i'm SO angry right now i can't even think straight. i tried a file restore program a year ago and it couldn't recover the files because they were OVERWRITTEN by the god damn nandroid files.
i would've had 600mb free or so after the nandroid yest..and now i have 2.61 gigs free. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
When you put data on ANY NAND based memory device, be it an SSD drive, SDcard, the phone's eMMC memeory, you're putting data on a device that's designed to fail. NAND is NOT designed to be 100% reliable. Anyone that has been around computers long enough knows that there's no such thing as 100% reliable data storage solution consisting of only one device. Hence, IMPORTANT data is backed up or stored on a RAID 1, 5, 50, 51, or similar array. That's how the big boys do it. That's how I've done it. I've personally had so many NAND devices fail I seriously question the wisdom of storing anything of value on any NAND device, including an SSD.
These devices incorporate technology that's supposed to compensate for the steady degradation of NAND, but they're not perfect, and NAND has a significantly higher rate of failure and degradation as compared to mechanical solutions such as platter based disks. I've lost data just running the battery until it died. It sucks you lost data. Best thing I can tell you is put faith in technologies that deserve it. NAND is NOT that solution by any means.

^Agreed, not only is it a NAND device that isn't as reliable but it's a cell phone that is all too easy to physically lose or destroy.
I'd try out Recuva and get what you can from the SD card, and then I would make it a habit to keep copies of your pictures on a computer somewhere. It takes not even a minute to hook up a cable, find the pics and hit ctrl+c & ctrl+v.
I personally burn all my data to DVD, and I have a stack of like 150 data CD's I've burned since I was about 15. I keep it on my HDD initially, and when it hits either 3 months or 7 gigs I'll just put it on a disc and move it to an external unit. It started out as a habit I did to make more space on the small hard drives they had back then.
Funny thing is I just bought an SSD for my new build, it's just for the OS and applications though.

Connect to your pc as a disk drive and run recuva, spelled just like that. It works miracles.
Sent from my ADR6300 using XDA App

thanks guys, i'm gonna give recuva a try. today at work, i tried the official sandisk app that comes with the expensive ass SD cards (you get a voucher to use a recovery app for free) and although it recovered some, it didn't work that well..some were corrupt, some had only a quarter of the pic (the rest was just gray) and then when i tried to copy them all to my flash drive to bring home, it would error out within like 2 minutes and just say that the flash drive wasn't connected anymore..and that flash drive was in perfect shape lol so idk, i'm gonna try to get them recovered here now

[Q] Lots of photos got corrupted during copying to PC!

I was just this moment ago proceeding to move all the photos that had been saved to the MicroSD inside my GT-i9505 to the PC via USB connection. I was using the default MTP/PTP(?) explorer interface to find my photos.
I must've had something like 3GB worth of photos and videos on the card (I went a bit crazy with the camera in recent weeks!) and thought there would be nothing wrong with moving them off the card and onto my PC's hard disk. The whole moving process took quite a while so I thought I'd leave it to do its thing and then come back once it had finished.
But when I did, I noticed something bizarre - the folder was reported to come in at 2.55 TB (yes, *terabytes*!). I thought it was a silly Windows Explorer bug, but I reopened the window and checked Properties, and yup, still 2.55 TB. The drive partition I moved them to was compressed so I didn't actually need that much space, but it was still worrying. I checked some of the files and realised a fair amount of them were reported to be 3.42 GB each! The compressed size (size on disk) Windows 7 reported on the other hand was only 4 KB. Uh-oh. I tried to open them but Windows' own picture viewer had errors with them. I checked one file through a hex editor and noticed the majority of the file was just blank data followed by a smidgen of data at the very end, with no sign of headers.
So somehow, by doing something as innocent as moving photos and videos off of an S4-mounted MicroSD card, they got corrupted beyond repair in the process! What the hell?!
I'm gutted. Out of a total of 1,029 files and roughly 3GB, I managed to recover only 265 JPGs and 793 MB. Why did this happen? Is this a known issue with the phone or with MicroSD cards? I'm wondering whether it's anything to do with the MicroSD card I used - a non-brand specific 16GB one bought from my local Maplin and in a Maplin cardboard packet (online link at maplin.co.uk/micro-secure-digital-sdhc-memory-card-228011). The odd thing is that the phone and the OS reported no problems with the card, and the photos and videos saved to the card were fine and perfectly viewable on the phone just before I moved them off. As it is, I've now got 2 1/2 TBs worth of (presumably) permanently-damaged media files. Is there anything else I can do?
What I'm using, as follows:
Samsung Galaxy S4 GT-i9505
16GB Maplin-brand MicroSD card
Windows 7 32-bit
If you need any other specs, let me know.

No handy words of advice for next time, then?

This is what i do if i want to move ANY type of file from phone to other storage. I COPY, NOT MOVE files first to the destination that i want to and if they are successful then i will delete the other files from the phone. That way, if they do corrupt on destination, at least you still have originals because you copied only.
Hope this helps.

Yeah, sounds like something I'll have to remember for next time.
I wish I knew exactly what the cause was. It could've been anything - the drive partition and/or its compressed state, the MicroSD card, the rather crappy MTP interface forced upon by Google, the large volume of the media I was copying (like I said, it was over 1,000 files).
I have a small feeling it might be the last one somehow, as the photos stored directly on the phone (of which there weren't that many before I switched to MicroSD) moved across to PC in perfect condition, as did the screenshots I also captured. Furthermore, I decided to do a quick test with the MicroSD by picking a random spot and repeatedly pressing the camera button/icon to take as many photos as possible in a short period of time. I managed to make over 100 before I got bored, but when I moved them off the card in the same manner as before (phone mounted to USB, MTP interface) they came out unscathed and not in any ballooned size.
Has anyone else ever come across any issues with moving large amounts of files at once between PC and phone-mounted MicroSD? The only other time I did a very large mass transfer was with some various ROMs for emulator use to my Nexus 7 tablet's onboard storage, and as far as I know they all came out fine.
It's frustrating when it seems like a problem such as this one is totally alien and googling can't help with jack.