StarDestroyer.Net BBS

The received wisdom is that defragmenting solid state media such as CompactFlash and SD flash memory cards is unnecessary, at least that's what I'd always heard. With magnetic hard drives, fragmentation hurts performance because of the time it takes to physically move the drive heads around when a file is non-contiguous, but since flash memory does not have to move drive physical heads around, it makes sense that any performance loss due to fragmentation would be extremely minimal. However, it was claimed in a usenet post that in fact major benefit could be derived by defragmenting Pocket PC flash storage, but since the author of that controversial claim had not (yet) published any data to support it, I decided to investigate myself.