Notices

Originally Posted by wmarone

Formatting the drive with a standard disk format will not fix the issue either. You'd need a special tool to do a secure erase (thus also needing to repartition) and I don't know if one is included on the N900 by default.

Additionally, fragmentation on NAND has zero impact on read speeds. I think you're imagining things, really.


Well, more like you smeared writes across much more of the flash. The end result being that future writes will be somewhat slower.

Originally Posted by maxximuscool

I formated it with the N900 and Windows then N900 again.
But I'm going to try formating it with the secure Mac OSX Distool to erase everything on it. Backing up right now. I don't believe that by defraging it once though not finished could smeared the writes across the flash. Though this hasn't been 100% proven. Basically it's in theory because of the flash drive doesn't have any moving objects.

I struggled to get into my memory card previously, the file explorer will either freeze for a moment then back to smooth again. I'll secure erase it may be 7-Pass Erase. It erases the information used to acess my files and writes zeros over the data 7 times. It meets the US Department of Defense standard for securely erasing.

If 7 times is a bad thing then I will just do it Once. What do you think?

So is it that bad, I defraged my eMMC for a while and gave up afterward. It didn't finished and I formated it instead and moving files out and in. I'm going to reformating it with the MacBook Pro again to clean out all the 1 values.

Originally Posted by ericsson

So you are gonna kill it 7 times just to be sure ? LOL

Originally Posted by maxximuscool

Lol yeah to reply to the comments above. That it required a clean secure format. Oh well, I gave up lol. I'll just going to use what the current format I got now. It doesn't degrade anything. Whether it is partially defragmented previously, it will not be a problem with me. Thus the camera doesn't even record smoothly anyway.

Originally Posted by Ignacius

For clarifying this....

Flash drives has nothing to do with the way HD drives work. While fragmentation is bad on HD drives because of the way they access the data (if the data is written secuencialy the read of all of it is done without moving the magnetic heads, while if fragmented much time is wasted in repositioning the magnetic heads) on flash drives the data is accesed without any mechanical parts having to move so the access is constant for all the memory cells wherever they are. So defragmenting flash drives isn't so good idea...

Originally Posted by wmarone

Perhaps I should have been clearer. When I meant "secure" I did not mean cryptographically secure but instead secure in that data was actually removed. This generally requires special, SSD (or NAND, rather) aware tools that explicitly erase each block.

Running the OS X "secure erase" tool will do nothing but wear the eMMC further and make disk performance worse.

The camera not recording smoothly likely has more to do with the CPU getting interrupted by something else. Of course, now that you've smashed your internal memory several times over then chances are your recording will be worse now.

Originally Posted by j.s

Defragmentation on HD drives is only needed for poorly designed file system types, such as FAT and NTFS. Most file systems for unixish systems are designed to minimize fragmentation and susceptibility to fragmentation.

I tried to post this last night, but talk.maemo.org became unresponsive for longer than I could stay awake. That seems to happen often around 5:00 UTC.

Originally Posted by maxximuscool

lol I didn't smashed it serveral time. I only format it using a Quick Format via Windows and Format again via N900 just to make sure the file system is compatible.

Originally Posted by j.s

You have posted that you have defragmented it. Even once is enough to "smash it several times". Defragmenting a mostly filled and fragmented partition will move files several times apiece, not counting all the moving a flash disk does behind the back of the OS.