Memory Optimise/Defragment?

Hi- Have just purchased the 8gb Sansa Fuze (superb bit o’ kit!) Am running windows XP, using windows media player using MP3 format and MTP mode.
My question is that I having deleted many tracks from various CD’s I have loaded to the device, I wonder is it necessary to defragment the memory to optimise the gaps this has caused?
I have tried to use my pc’s defragmenter but can’t access the Fuze’s memory with my defragmenter.
Is it possible to optimise the memory at all or or does the fuze optimise its self when tracks are deleted?
Many Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Youric.

Flash memory, being solid-state, doesn’t take any longer to access scattered sectors than it does to access sequential sectors. It may be possible to defragment, but it’s completely unnecessary. In fact, I believe I’ve read that it would do more harm than good. Flash memory has a limited number of writes per sector (but the number is still quite large), so defragmenting “wears out” the memory faster.

The NAND flash memory of your Sansa employs a special wear leveling system.  Essentially, unlike a hard drive that stores data in sequential “strips” of data, the Sansa stores the data in a pattern determined by the wear leveling algorithm.  “Defragmenting” utilities don’t help with flash memory, they are designed for hard drives only.

As far as memory optimization, simply use the sevice’s built in Format command to start with a clean slate.  The format command will allocate 32KB blocks, the optimum for the Sansa; Windows’ Format command likes 4KB blocks- not very good for the Sansa (it makes for a huge file allocation table, very inefficient).

Bob  :wink:

Good job I asked first - more to it than I had imagined: thank-you for the excellent info very much appreciated! :smiley:

Crikey- Been out of the loop for a while so things have moved on without me, did not appreciate any of this. Makes sense to me now, thank-you for the full and very useful reply.:smiley: I need to catch up on gadgets instaed of ‘laying on my laurels’ so to speak.

Cheers!

Youric.