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I've seen a few apps online, but they don't seem legitimate. From what I've seen, they don't seem to show what's going on while the drive is being defragmented. So I decided I wanna stay away from defragmenters in the Google Play store.

What would be an efficient way to defrag my both my phone's SD card and internal storage?

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There's no reason to defragment flash media. It serves no purpose, because access to any flash cell is going to take the same amount of time as access to any other flash cell. The reason defragmenting is beneficial to mechanical hard drives is because it makes related data blocks contiguous, so that they can all be read in order as the disk is spinning and minimizing the amount of movement needed from the drive heads. Flash media has none of these moving parts, and therefore does not suffer from the same problems as mechanical drives.

In fact, defragmenting flash media could potentially be detrimental, because it will wear the memory faster while not providing any benefit. Flash memory firmwares will actually fragment data intentionally, in a practice known as wear-leveling, which helps to prevent specific cells from being overused and wearing out more than others.

Flash-based devices generally benefit from TRIMing, but Android 4.3 or higher will do this for you automatically. Apps that claim to perform defragmentation are suspicious at best. Even if they "work", there is no reason to use them.

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  • I do not agree. The answer is a bit oversimplistic. In reality, since the flash memory is not connected directly to the memory bus, it is accessed via physical drive protocols. Each time you switch to a new fragment there are seeks involved. The seek time, as low as it is on flash drives, still takes way longer than a sequential read. Remember you are not accessing the memory directly, but through a controller. There is no reason to intentionally fragment everything. Only changing data. Most app's executables don't get modified on a daily basis. So defragmenting the OS after lots of apps updat – user127912 Sep 18 '15 at 10:52
  • And given the amount of malicious adware apps in the Play Store these days, you should be wary of installing anything, much more these "performance apps". – Mindwin Sep 18 '15 at 14:01
  • (continuing Elibs comment) ...update could be beneficial. Also, increased fragment size can cause increase in memory use to cache all the disk seek data, thus slowing CPU performance. – onik Sep 19 '15 at 7:50
  • So how do you manually TRIM a flash device if you are on an older version of Android? My device has been getting slower and slower and it has been suggested to me that this could help. – Michael Nov 13 '15 at 18:31
  • @Michael I think there are a few apps out there that will try to do it for you, but they probably require root. I'm also not sure if older version of Android have the necessary binaries. Here's one you could take a look at, though: forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2104326 – eldarerathis Nov 13 '15 at 21:02
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Defragmenting storage IC memory is not recommended for it may actually break the IC... Just like how SSDs are, you simply do not defragment Storage IC or it may break... also as far as I know Unix systems don't need to defrag since the files are already arranged in such a way that it is faster to access them

a better explanation here: http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting

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