How do I defragment a volume?

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So I've been messing around with sound file replacement in video games with my SD card, and been getting stupid staticy sounds. I checked with my friends in the same branch, and they all said the same thing-"you need to defrag your SD card".
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So I need do defragment my SD card. The problem is, I've been looking around for apps that will do this, and I'm coming up with nothing.

Is there any free application that will defragment a volume on my macbook? I'm using 10.5.4 leopard (intel).

iDefrag. Not free, but there is a free demo version.

Free option...back it up, and then just format it

iDefrag did not work, it was the first thing that came up and it refused to touch the volume. Same with the Drive Genius 3.0 demo.

@Technologist: if that'll work...

Neither iDefrag or Drive Genius will attempt to defrag a SD card, CF card, or any other type of removable flash media.

You can erase and format it as suggested, but don't use Disk Utility as it will create two partitions on the SD card in the process. You'll wind up with a small 200 MB partition and the rest as a single large partition. That might render the card useless. If you really want to format it, use Disk Manager from Windows (as long as the card does not exceed 32 GB) and you should be OK.

BTW, SD cards are normally formatted to FAT.

Regards.

Basically every option takes virtually forever. And it refragments almost immediately. Urge to kill rising...

chscag said:

Neither iDefrag or Drive Genius will attempt to defrag a SD card, CF card, or any other type of removable flash media.

You can erase and format it as suggested, but don't use Disk Utility as it will create two partitions on the SD card in the process. You'll wind up with a small 200 MB partition and the rest as a single large partition. That might render the card useless. If you really want to format it, use Disk Manager from Windows (as long as the card does not exceed 32 GB) and you should be OK.

BTW, SD cards are normally formatted to FAT.

Regards.

Click to expand...

Permanently?

Why would you defrag flash memory? There's no moving parts. It's not like you're waiting for the heads to jump back and forth across a platter. As I understand it, defragmenting any kind of flash shortens its usable life by doing lots of unnecessary writes.

To weemax:

No. The damage to the card can be fixed but the process is convoluted and confusing and has to be done from a Windows command line prompt.

But as cwa107 points out, flash media is not designed to be defragmented and can actually shorten its life.

Regards.