Disk Defragment on TomTom's?

[Ikeason]

Hello everyone~

I was wondering if anyone knew whether or not its ok to do a Disk Defragment on the TomTom GO 720?
After backing up, I was looking at my avail space left on the internal and decided to check the Disk Defrag, and sure enough there are 3 huge sections of Red. Had anyone done it or is there a write up or post about it?

 

[PSJ]

I would caution you not too !

Because the brains of the Go series is Linux.



If you start having real problems....there are ways to format and reinstall everything from the Navcore to the maps. ( It is a little involved ) so I won't go into it now.



.

 

[canderson]

Hello everyone~

I was wondering if anyone knew whether or not its ok to do a Disk Defragment on the TomTom GO 720?
After backing up, I was looking at my avail space left on the internal and decided to check the Disk Defrag, and sure enough there are 3 huge sections of Red. Had anyone done it or is there a write up or post about it?

No. Except in the rarest of cases, there would be no benefit.

Here's a good Wikipedia entry for Flash Memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory.

Defragging an SD card will involve you in two areas that you want to avoid. First is the fact that an SD is block oriented, and erasure in a block-by-block fashion is slow. If you think defragging a hard drive takes a while ... get lots of coffee for this job! Defragging typically causes a lot of read/erase/write activity as it shuffles things around into their final positions.

The other is that the onboard controller on the SD card is attempting to achieve as much wear leveling as possible (not focusing too much on one area of the memory for writes) so as to even out the limited write cycles. Yeah, it's MUCH better than it used to be, but it does have limited life. This internal leveling algorithm is one reason they last as long as they do now. Best to let the SD's own onboard controller do its job.

 

[Ikeason]

Roger that guys. Will leave it be.

 

[Gilbert]

An SD & Flash memory is not like a hard drive, it does not have any moving parts such as the read/write head. Defragging a hard drive will prevent the head from going all over the disk's surface when reading file(s). There is no such thing on SD storage and just reads blocks at addresses not affected by their location. IOW, there is no slowdown caused by file fragmentation on SD drives.