I have a USB flash drive formatted to fat32 and I have a batch file to defragment it. Would there be any damage done to the flash drive or it's files if I was to unplug it from the USB port while it was defragmenting. Thanks in advance.
Asked
Active
Viewed 173 times
1
-
3**Why are you defragmenting a USB flash drive?** Defragmenting shuffles data around such that files occupy contiguous areas on disk, because rotational drives have considerable seek latency (so you want to reduce the number of seeks required for any given data access). Solid-state storage doesn't have that problem as flash chip reads basically require constant time regardless of location, so normally have no need whatsoever for defragmentation (and doing it increases the wear on the drive's flash chips, quite possibly reducing the life expectancy of the flash drive). – user May 23 '14 at 12:54
-
Thanks I thought they needed de-fraternising like any other USB. – 09stephenb May 23 '14 at 12:55
1 Answers
4
Removing any drive while defragmenting can cause damage to the file system. When you defragment a drive, the computer is constantly reading data from the drive and writing it to different parts of the drive. So if you were to remove the drive during this process, there is a strong possibility data that was read will not get written and there will be corruption. You should always stop defragmenting before removing a drive.
Also, if you dont have a removable drive set for quick removal in Windows, pulling it out before unmounting it can cause file damage as well.
Keltari
- 71,875
- 26
- 179
- 229