Re: reformatting compact flash cards.

Tech-Archive recommends: Speed Up your PC by fixing your registry

From: AlanS (news_at_remove.abyz.fslife.co.uk)
Date: 04/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 11:54:31 +0100

There is probably little, if any, benefit in defragmenting solid state
memory. It adds a possible risk of failure during movement of files.

Remember that memory cards are solid state- it takes the same time to access
any sector, but with hard disks you have the time taken for head movement
over the disk platters so can get decent speed improvements. A slight
improvement may be possible where files are badly fragmented compared to
contiguous files as the index does not need to be read for each block, but
this will not really be noticeable to the user in the way disk fragmentation
may be. Disk access is in milliseconds, in memory it will be measured in
nanoseconds- orders of magnitude faster.

If you do it, fine, but remember you may see no benefit and there is the
potential for damaged data.
It is possible to defragment the cards using a Windows utility and a card
reader if you want to do it.

"Darren Griffin - PocketGPSWorld" <darren@pocketgpsworld.invalid> wrote in
message news:uELO%23%23nLEHA.556@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
> grazzc wrote:
> > Possibly off topic- if so apologies, but my pocketpc running pocket
> > windows 2003 is having problems with one of my compact flash cards
> > (integralmemory 512mb). My pocketpc is telling me that there are no
> > files on the card, but that 341.62 megs of it are being used. Ive
> > tried to look at it on my Xp desktop using activesynch and explore
> > device, but again its showing nothing on the disk, not even any
> > hidden files or system files. I suspect that its been corrupted or
> > interupted when ive been downloading something to it, and i cant
> > erase it and get the space back. Does anyone know how i can reformat
> > the card to reclaim the lost space. Ive tried using flash format, but
> > it will only work on sd cards integral to the ipaq. I dont have a
> > memory card reader for my pc so that option is out, and i dont really
> > want to have to buy one as i dont really need it.
> [SNIP]
>
> Softwinter's Storage Tools is a PPC utility that will scan, defrag and
> format storage cards, get it on our downloads page at
>
http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=17
> --
> Darren Griffin
> Pocket GPS World - http://www.pocketgpsworld.com
> The Premier GPS Resource for News, Reviews and Forums
>
>

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