Need to defrag a USB drive

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Hi All,

I need to Defrag a USB drive but I cant find a tool for it and not sure if First Aid in Disk utility will do it.

Long Story Short I have a program on my USB drive and I need to defrag the drive so it will work in an old computer console, all videos on it use windows so need to see if there's a good/reliable tool for mac otherwise its the VirtualBox route.

cheers
 

pigoo3

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I need to Defrag a USB drive but I cant find a tool for it and not sure if First Aid in Disk utility will do it.

Should probably more specifiically define what sort of 'USB drive" this is. "USB" is an interface/port-type...not a type of drive. In theory this "USB drive" could be:

- An older style "spinner" hard drive.
- A thumb drive/stick drive.
- An external optical drive.
- An external SDD.

If this happened to be an external SSD...it's not recommended to defrag SSD's.

I realize that very likely this is an external spinner HD. But in theory...a "USB Drive" could be a lot of different things.:)

- Nick
 
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Nick, I took USB drive to mean Thumb/Flash drive, but you're correct, clarification is needed.
 
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My bad, should of clarified in the original post. but yes its a USB thumb/flash
 
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The easiest way to do that for free is to copy everything off the thumb drive to your Mac, erase and reformat the thumb drive and then copy everything back to it. The files being put back will be defragged because the drive is empty and clean when you start.
 

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Why do you need a defrag the USB thumb drive to begin with?
 
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Why do you need a defrag the USB thumb drive to begin with?

I need to defrag it so a program will work on an old computer console
 

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I need to defrag it so a program will work on an old computer console

Why would the console care? The file table of the format you've chosen will keep track of the chunks of data and should allow access to everything. The situation where I see having contiguous data is important is if the data is being access in a raw manner bypassing the fat table.
 
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Why would the console care? The file table of the format you've chosen will keep track of the chunks of data and should allow access to everything. The situation where I see having contiguous data is important is if the data is being access in a raw manner bypassing the fat table.

Following instructions and it just said they need to be defragged for the program to work, did try it and the programs dont work so its now trying to defrag it
 

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Following instructions and it just said they need to be defragged for the program to work, did try it and the programs dont work so its now trying to defrag it

You've totally piqued my curiosity on this now (sorry, that's the engineer in me). What old console is this and what program, if you can share.
 
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You've totally piqued my curiosity on this now (sorry, that's the engineer in me). What old console is this and what program, if you can share.

lol you didn't think your get this question today.

So its for a PS2, some of my games I have for the PS2 haven't been looked after, so will play up now and then. So I place one program on the USB thumb/flash drive which the PS2 recognises and brings up a menu, I have got the ISO/Program of my games from the CD's and have placed inside a folder the original program recognises. When i access the menu the games ISO/program appears but wont load and this is where the defrag comes in, I need to defrag the USB thumb/flash to make the games work.

Im hoping this all works lol
 

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Thank you for the info. One thing to keep in mind is that with Flash based storage devices (USB flash drives, SSDs, MMC, eMMC, etc.) there is a thing called wear leveling that ensures that the flash parts all wear equally and no part fails before others reducing the available storage of the drive. Flash has a limited lifetime as it relates to erase cycles.

The cheapest USB flash drives will likely not have any wear leveling built in (and will rely on software to do that), but more expensive ones might. So again, if the PS2 is forcibly trying to read data in a contiguous manner, the wear leveling might not yield the result it wants.

Defragging would have no effect on this and technically defragging is bad for flash drives.
 
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Thank you for the info. One thing to keep in mind is that with Flash based storage devices (USB flash drives, SSDs, MMC, eMMC, etc.) there is a thing called wear leveling that ensures that the flash parts are wear equally and no part fails before others reducing the available storage of the drive. Flash has a limited lifetime as it relates to erase cycles.

The cheapest USB flash drives will likely not have any wear leveling built in (and will rely on software to do that), but more expensive ones might. So again, if the PS2 is forcibly trying to read data in a contiguous manner, the wear leveling might not yield the result it wants.

Defragging would have no effect on this and technically defragging is bad for flash drives.

thanks Raz0rEdge thats one of the downsides to doing it this way but cheaper in the long run plus I dont have room for storing game discs lol
 

pigoo3

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My bad, should of clarified in the original post. but yes its a USB thumb/flash

Thanks for clarifying.:)

As Ashwin mentioned...typically not a great idea to defrag these sort of drives. But if this is the only way to get things to work...gotta do what ya gotta do.;)

- Nick
 
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I need to Defrag a USB drive but I cant find a tool for it and not sure if First Aid in Disk utility will do it.


Just backup the contents, erase the flash drive and copy back the saved contents.

Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper would work well or even use Disk Utility to create an image, erasae the flash drive and install the image back to the flash drive.


EDIT:
The more I think about it the more I wonder why it would be so drastically important to defrag the data on a flash drive.
Long Story Short I have a program on my USB drive and I need to defrag the drive so it will work in an old computer console, all videos on it use windows so need to see if there's a good/reliable tool for mac otherwise its the VirtualBox route.

It really doesn't make any logical sense, but not my concern.






- Patrick
======
 
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