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.
I'm not a big flash memory user myself, but I thought this was interesting.
D13 touched on this, but flash has quite a limited lifespan when measured in total operations. Moving stuff around to improve access speeds seems odd when it's seriously cutting down the total writes you've got for actual use.
And say, how are the problems associated with flash and repeated writing to one location solved in the new 32GB (and soon 64GB) flash hard drives? Or in the hybird drives that Vista systems support, for that matter.
Newer drives aren't that much limited by the writes. Yes, the limit is still there, but its basicly a several years of intense usage non-stop. And all the applications (including Vista) are a bit smarter about it so its extended even more.
