Program for Defragmenting a Specific Drive

Hey guys,

I own a Cowon D2+ media player and after recently reformatting my notebook, file transfer speeds have been extremely slow. The device is advertised as getting file transfer speeds between 30-40mb/sec. Now, I am only getting 1-2mb/sec, which is awfully slow. I remember getting better transfer speeds before.

Does anyone know what could have possibly caused this?

To my main point, one solution I'm willing to try is to defragment my D2's internal flash drive, as well as it's SD storage card. I'm not really sure if this would work, but I'm open to giving it a try.

The built-in disk defragmenter of Vista doesn't seem to have a function of just defragmenting specific drives. I was wondering if anyone knew of any free software that does this. Would Defraggler do the job? I use CCleaner and I'm really satisfied with it so far.

Thanks for any suggestions...

 

I think generally in terms of transferring, you will get slow speeds if you try to transfer many small files versus a single big file (ie: 1-2 MBps for 5 gigs of 500 files versus 30-40 MBps for a 5 gig ISO file). Windows may also have some part in slowing down transfers, but not to the extent you are describing.

It could also be your MP3 player too. Check this out:
http://www.cowonglobal.com/zeroboar...m&bmenu=support&desc=asc&no=208&bmenu=support

 

The Windows Defragmentation programme does have the ability to defrag an individual - just get rid of the scheduled defrag.

Else, Defraggler, MyDefrag would do the trick.

About file transfer speeds - yes, small files do transfer significantly slower than large ones - and with MP3 files to a HDD I still see over 6MB in terms of write speed.

On a HDD its useful to push files together to have continuous free space - shouldn't apply to flash though.

Did you keep the same filesystem and format from the player?

 

the most simple way i "defragment" some usb-stick like device is i copy out all the data, and copy it back in. it should not be fragmented, then, but written in the most flash-friendly layout your usb device can write (depends on it's write-logic. some have some wearleveling).

much more effective, more simple, my preferred way to clean up any form of data drive

 

It does, but only if you have SP1 or later installed. (If you don't, then you should really install both SP1 and SP2 anyway for performance and security reasons.) When you run defrag, you can click the button that says "Select volumes...".

However, flash memory doesn't benefit much from defrag, due to the very fast seek times of flash memory. I wouldn't recommend it for your mp3 player. I really doubt that's what's causing your performance problems.

However, it wouldn't surprise me if installing SP1 or SP2 improved things... I remember hearing something about file copy performance improvements in one of those service packs.

 

Thanks everyone for the replies.

You and DetlevCM raise a valid point that smaller files tend to transfer slower than big batches of files. I actually ran a quick test with my D2+ and found the following results:
Transferred 1.49GB with a speed of 3.5-4.6mb/sec.
Transferred 99.2MB at a rate of 2-3.2mb/sec.

Those should attest to the claims...
And by the way, thanks for the link; but the device listed there is not the same model as mine and faces a different issue. I think that support article only concerns iAudio7 users, but my player is a D2+.

Yes, I keep the same filesystem/root folders from the player. Otherwise, it wouldn't recognize my media. But the Cowon devices are unique as both the internal flash and external SD card are read via one USB connection.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try doing this in the future if I encounter worse problems. Actually, I have already tried to "clean" my memory before. When I first got the device, I formatted both the internal flash and my SD card using the Panasonic SD Card Formatter. Since I installed new firmware, it definitely helped in speeding up transfer rates before and I recommend using this for SD cards or any flash devices for that matter.

Point taken. I did some extra research too and found the same results. Flash drives dont have a read/write head and it might even cause degradation for the flash cells. I'll actually decrease the lifetime of my flashdrive by defragmenting it.

On another note, after reformatting my notebook last month, I still haven't gotten the automatic update for SP1 or SP2. The most recent I update I have listed is IE8, which I really don't want to install. Is there any way to bypass this update and continue getting newer Vista updates without installing IE8?

 

Why don't you want IE8? Its more secure than IE7.

And is there a way - yepp, standalone installers.

 

Well, I actually tried it before during the early months of its release and I found it to be slower due to all thos newly added features (accelerators, web slices, etc.). I reverted back to IE7 and I'm still using it, along with Firefox now.

I was kind of trying to avoid the solution involving standalone installers, as I would like the updates to be automatic, just like how Vista has been doing it. Is there any way I can still continue having automatic updates, and SP1 and 2 without installing IE8?

 

Honestly, what's wrong with a standalone installer????

Its doing exactly the same except that you have to download it manually first.

IE8 - get rid of the accelerators if you don't like them? I know I did when I was using it.

 

Try IE8 again. It's faster than IE7 in my experience, not slower.

In any case, if you use the standalone installer to install SP1 and/or SP2, you can still use Windows Update to download subsequent OS patches.

EDIT: If your IE8 is slow, I suggest trying this tweak: http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=2443&cpage=4#comments

I haven't tried it myself since I haven't had IE 8 performance problems... and usually use Firefox anyway.

 

install ie8. you can turn off all those new fancy features, it will be faster than ie7. and more secure, which matters much more. even if you don't use it often, it matters.