Smart Phones ....

Rob Keeble

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GTA Ontario Canada
Just a heads up to something that had never even crossed my mind but if your smart phone starts to get bogged down have a go at plugging it into your computer and use the defragger on the windows accessories system tools menu to defrag the internal memory of the phone. The results are amazing. :)
 
Sorry no clue Rennie you just gotta try plug it into your computer via USB and then go to your Start menu and select accessories then select system tools and choose the defragger. See if it finds the drive letter allocated to the Iphone as a drive. If it does then i see no reason why you cannot give it a try. All defragging is doing is moving stuff around so you get more contiguous free space meaning when it comes to storing or retrieving something the phone operating system is not looking all over the place to get a complete set of data to load. Worked on my Atrix.
 
Rob, I think you're seeing a placebo effect. Do you have any metrics to actually show the performance improvement, or did your phone just need a reboot?

I ask this, because in my work in the defragmenter business (we wrote the engines for the one you're using, BTW), the idea of defragging solid state drives was researched very thoroughly. Yes, they can be defragged, but there's little to no improvement in performance, and over time, you can actually do more harm than good. Here's an article that describes things pretty well:

http://ask-leo.com/should_i_defragment_my_usb_flash_drive.html

Granted, that's a four year old article, and even Leo the Tech Guy didn't know all of the things that we were doing at the time to improve the performance of solid state drives. (The company I was working for back then was developing various optimization tools. Note that I said optimization, not defragmentation.) These days, there are ways to optimize a solid state disk, and I know some (if not all) of the SSD manufacturers are building the optimization technology into the devices themselves. On the flash memory of a smart phone though, I don't believe there's any internal optimization happening, and as far as I know, there aren't any utilities available for consumers to do it themselves.
 
Nope Vaughn no metrics. I reboot regularly because i actuall kill my phone overnight, after being woken up by all sorts of calls not for me in the middle of the night. But was looking at Atrix info on web for some other problems and found the defrag suggestion. It definitely seemed to perform better. But i had a hard time believing that with the speed of flash access that any defragging was going to make a huge improvement. So i dunno just the experience i had was a change in how screeens popped. Has not helped my tapatalk situation at all though. I will read through the article sometime thanks anyhow.
 
Rob, one thing that defragging does that can improve performance on a solid state drive is make the free space contiguous. But, the read/write activity the defragger does to get that contiguous free space can be detrimental to the longevity of the drive.
 
Has not helped my tapatalk situation at all though.

Rob, what problems have you been having with tapatalk? I just got a new android phone at work. My old Treos Windows phone had a problem and I took it to one of our IT guys to fix. First thing he said was "What are you doing with this old thing? I am going to order you a new phone!". So I have used tapatalk and have not noticed any problems, but would like to know what to look out for.

Opps I just saw the other thread. "Never mind"
 
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