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Problem with Defragging a Flash Drive.


robot202

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I have been using the previous versions of Defraggler on all my systems at work and my home PC. Occasionally I would also defrag my 3 year old, very heavily used, 2 gb flash drive. All derfrags have always worked perfectly and I have be very pleased with the results using Defraggler.

 

Yesterday I downloaded on installed Defraggler ver 1.04.098 on my home PC and defragged my 2 120gb and 1 300gb drives.. Worked great.

 

I then decided to defrag my 3 week old 16gb flash drive. This drive is also used a lot at work so I figured I would defrag it and see how well defraggler 1.04 worked with my newest flash drive. The defrag only took a few minutes to complete which is normal for my other flash drive.

 

Now the 16gb flash drive does not work at all. The only thing I am able to do to the flash drive now is change the drive letter in Disk Management. Everything I try to do to the drive results in a Disk Media not Present, Insert Disk, or Disk not Ready messages.

 

I realize this is a one time happening and I cannot try this again to verify my problem as I do not have any more 16gb flah drives to experiment on. The drive has a life time warranty so is will be RMAed today.

 

The older versions of Defraggler worked fine with my older flash drive, but I am not sure about Defraggler 1.04 on the newer bigger high speed flash drives.

 

I like Defraggler a lot, but I wanted to pass along my bad experience as a word of caution.

 

Robot

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Good news that you can replace the drive.

 

Can I suggest you read this post regarding defragging flash drives. Seems to know what he's talking about.

 

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showto...st&p=117629

 

Personally, I wouldn't attempt a defrag on a flash drive. These things can suddenly give up the ghost for no apparent reason at all. I have a 1gb drive, which wasn't very old, which suddenly decided it was 4.5mb.

 

Nothing I did could convince it otherwise.

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Good news that you can replace the drive.

 

Can I suggest you read this post regarding defragging flash drives. Seems to know what he's talking about.

 

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showto...st&p=117629

 

Personally, I wouldn't attempt a defrag on a flash drive. These things can suddenly give up the ghost for no apparent reason at all. I have a 1gb drive, which wasn't very old, which suddenly decided it was 4.5mb.

 

Nothing I did could convince it otherwise.

 

 

Hi, I once had aUSB flash drive that showed the wrong capacity of space left and the only way I could fix that is by formatting it.

So you guys can try formatting it and see if that helps.

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Thanks for all the replys. It looks like if I want to tidy up my flash drive the best way to do this is to copy the data to my hard drive, do a quick format, and then copy the data back.

 

I guess I will just stop messing so much and just use it.

 

Thanks,

 

Robot

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You don't really need to defrag a flash drive. The access time is negligible compared to a hard drive and it doesn't require the drive to make a physical move to access the data. This means that you'll very likely see no discernable improvement between a contiguous file vs a fragmented file.

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Good news that you can replace the drive.

 

Can I suggest you read this post regarding defragging flash drives. Seems to know what he's talking about.

 

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showto...st&p=117629

 

Personally, I wouldn't attempt a defrag on a flash drive. These things can suddenly give up the ghost for no apparent reason at all. I have a 1gb drive, which wasn't very old, which suddenly decided it was 4.5mb.

Indeed, and it needs to be made more common knowledge that defragmenting them really is a waste of time, and eventually the demise of the flash drive itself, plus the money to replace it.

 

As already mentioned formatting flash drives works rather well when problems are present - so long as it's not a worn out issue.

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Hi, I once had aUSB flash drive that showed the wrong capacity of space left and the only way I could fix that is by formatting it.

So you guys can try formatting it and see if that helps.

 

Thanks for the tip, but absolutely nothing could resurrect the missing space on that drive. The techies at my local PCWorld

had a good try before shrugging their shoulders and giving me a new one.

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