Compact flash card formatting (?)

[guestyboy]

While surfin' the net I came across this site:
So anyways I was wondering does any of this actually do anything. Does defragging a cf storage card actually help? I thought that those things only applied to hard drives and not solid state media :~

[BurningSheep]

[Dan East]

The actual media on which the information stored is not an issue. Regardless of the physical storage medium a filesystem still has to be applied to organize the data. It is that filesystem that becomes fragmented, where the chunks of data that comprise a "file" become discontinuous. This causes additional seeks which increase load time. So it is possible for any type of writable media to become fragmented over time. A few notes:

1) Hard drives have long seek times because the drive head has to physically move when a seek occurs. Solid state storage, like any flash-memory based media (CF, MMC, SD, etc) suffers very little seek overhead because there is no physical head to move to seek. Thus fragmentation is really not an issue on flash based media compared to a hard drive, floppy drive or CD-ROM (yes, a CD-ROM / DVD can be burnt with fragmented files).

2) Fragmentation only occurs from the writing of files. As files are constantly written to and grow in size, they become fragmented because the new chunks of data may end up somewhere else. The same thing happens when many small files are created and deleted often. So if you pretty much just copy a bunch of stuff to your Storage Card and just access it from then on, your card won't become fragmented.

I made another post about formatting Storage Cards in another thread here in the last few days. Take a look at that for more info. The free (shareware) version of can format a Storage Card if you need such capability.

Dan East