detraging the hard drive on your gps

Great tip. Thanks.

Have you done it yourself?

yes i have ones month and i found faster responce try it you will be impress by preformance you get you need to remenber that your gps is nothing but a pc with a gps reciver it has a hard drive i micro memory card and a microprocessor

My 775T has a built-in defrag program, so it's not required.

but the 1490t does not and the 200 seriousdoes not

Great tip, thanks
Larry

Solid state drives do have a finite number of read / write cycles to them though. Folks may want to keep that in mind.

I believe this issue has been discussed before and it was pointed out that unlike your comuter which is a disk drive your garmin is solid state so no moving parts. On a computer hard drive after a certain time you can speed it up by defragging. Since a typical hard drive is spinning and files get placed in different areas defragging does help speed things up by grouping files closer together so they can be read faster. On solid state drives since there is no moving parts you gain little to nothing by defragging and some pointed out it actually may shorten the life of your unit.

I personally don't think I will trust doing a defrag on my Nuvi. I agree its basically a computer, and I know computers sometimes fail to preform their functions without errors. I speak from experience. My Nuvi 265WT is working just fine and I am going to leave it alone unless it needs fixing.

thi is a matter of choice from my experience it has work for me i have notice great improvememt on my end as far off reducing the life of the gps i do not agree all is doing is moving the file closer so it reads faster it does not cause to reduce the life of the gps

Colonel, I do believe your performance boost you claim to be seeing is similar to the Placebo effect, because it has been well established that defragmenting solid state memory of any kind can be harmful. Read the link below, because it explains WHY defragmenting solid state memory devices of any kind (USB stick, solid state hard drives, GPS internal memory, etc.) doesn't help and is in fact a bad idea.

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

If you follow the same logic it would be better to load your POI files to an SD card than to the unit.

Bingo!

That's why my POIs are on my SD card and not internal memory.

This is very true, and a good point. I've always used the SD for my POI's; that's why it's there, right?

The cards are cheap, a new unit is not.

Your opinions might carry more weight if you would demonstrate that you have learned how to properly write the English language; that is using some punctuation and caps to make it easier to read.

Since you brought the subject up, LISTEN to what folks here are telling you. Follow the link provided and read it. You might gain some useful knowledge.

To me...don't do something that a manufacturer does not recommend. Why would someone want to take a chance and screw up their GPS by doing a defrag???? Some people just can't leave things alone...But if someone wants to take that chance so be it....

I agree with Frside007... Solid state drives don't need defragging. Your Garmin unit and/or SD memory need no defragging since they are pure electronic solid state drives - not an electro-mechanical hard drive. The reason you defrag is to minimize the travel time of the read-write head. Since SD memory doesn't require a read-write head, defragging is useless and unnecessary.

If you have a 1490T and have had it take longer to boot up while it sits at the "loading maps" screen then you are probably seeing the device doing a defrag using it's built in system. This is also a sign of an internal defrag on other Nuvi models.

My understanding is that one of the reasons that solid state memory lasts longer than they used to is because the controllers now use wear leveling.

Defragging would place all of the files in the same spot on the memory, thereby increasing wear and tear for that portion of the memory, leading to premature memory failure. Thus, it is important to let the controller place the files wherever the controller chooses because it prevents the memory from wearing out too quickly. The controllers are designed to to spread out the read-write cycles across the entire memory, rather than in one small spot.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling

I know of no common GPS with a hard drive. They have solid state drives. which are far different. There is no advantage in defragging a solid state drive, since any sector is accesses at the same speed (there is no rotational or head movement latency). Rather, is just helps ware out a solid state drive to defrag it, and some defrag algorithms rewrite data multiple times, increasing wear, since they were really written for hard disk use and not solid state disk use.

I agree with Freside007.

Defragging is only effective in dealing with hard drives because of the delay in moving from one sector to another. When a file isn't contiguous, it takes significant time to move the heads from one location to another. Memory accesses are much, much faster.

Fred

On my 200W, having a SD card installed with Canada, Mexico, Alaska, Oregon, and California increases the boot time because it has to read the maps from both internal memory and the SD card. The internal algorithm you speak of is likely the wear leveling and not a defragmenting.

I apologize for nitpicking. I do agree with you that if any GPS takes longer to boot than normal it's doing something with the data in the background. I simply think that it needs to be made clear that wear leveling and defragmenting are totally different things.

GPSr's don't have a hard disc drive with moving parts, so reading a file spread around the map doesn't take more time than continuous files. Defragging therefore doesn't bring performance improvement. It does increase (needlessly) the number of writes to the flash memory which can take only a limited number in its life time.

So defragging is essentially useless (it's rarely useful with HDD anyway) and counterproductive for the devices flash memory lifetime expectancy.

Yes, defragging a solid state drive is a function that should not be supported in Windows. It will NOT speed the unit up, as its not a hard drive with spinning platters. Its a series of chips and exactly how does one define 'fragmentation' on a chip? That makes no sense what-so-ever. That would be like suggesting your mp3 player played your music faster after you 'defragged' it. Nonsense. All it will do is waste your time and shorten the life of the device SIGNIFICANTLY. This is dangerous and should be avoided if you care about the longevity and reliability of your GPS or any solid state drive. This includes USB flash drives! DON'T DO IT. And if you do, don't come crying to me when it's burned up.

EVEN if defragging worked on GPS flash drives, it would be of dubious effort.

The maps, which are the largest files, are loaded only once. All the other little files, get created over time, but really are not that large.

Therefore, defragging is not going to anything.

On a PC you're adding / removing / copying large files all the time, which a defrag helps with.

On a GPS, not so much, so a defrag will really have very little effect.

GPS start-up times vary because they have to acquire satellites and depending on obstructions that may surround you, start-up times vary. It's not defragging. The unit does a look-up and calculates what satellites are available above the horizon, chooses the most probable (four) for maximum signal and triangulation. If it does not recieve signals from them (due to obstructions), then it moves to another satellite on the list and tries again until it acquires a fix.

Man I hate to be a critic, but didn't your computer come with the period and comma keys?

thank all of you for your comments the facts do show that some you are right and some you are close this a great way to bring out knowledge and Intelligence with out conflicts i have recommended this site to some of friends and i sure they will find this interesting as you can tell i found that this web site has more knowledge that garmin it self again thank you

Huh?

Well, it would appear that he or she only read PART of the comments......or just doesn't care about being rude. Sad.

I can appreciate the fact that we have members from all over the world here. I can well imagine English is not their first language... Non problema! Pas de probleme!

However, punctuation would be nice, instead of a wall of text.

...so bad.

This sounded like a good idea, so I set my Nuvi 750 up for defrag. On the first run, I called up My Computer and then to Tools to defrag my Garmin Drive. Since my main defragger is Diskeeper 2009, that program popped up and I set to Defragment the drive. It seemed to take forever to go through the process. But, I noticed it left the Map fragmented. The voices, etc, were defragged. Then, for the heck of it, I downloaded a free defragger by AusLogics and ran it again. It basically ended up with the same results. It said the defragmentation process was completed, but there remained 85% fragmented. For whatever reason, it would not remove the fragments in the map(s). Thoughts?

My thought would be don't mess around with the GPS.

This sounds like a GREAT idea. But how do you do it? My POI folder lives in the Garmin folder which is in the Garmin ....

Put a folder in the SD card named Garmin. Add a folder inside it named POI. Use the POI loader and choose the SD card as your destination.

If you already got POI.GPI in Garmin internal memory, just cut and paste the file to the SD card. POILoader isn't needed.

True. But, just detailing it for the OP on how to get set up for the next time they do it...

It's hard to imagine that the calculations can be done any faster, and it's the first I've heard of defragging the gps...

Windows thinks of Solid State Memory as a hard drive. When it looks for info it looks in a table that tells Windows on which track and sector the first pieces of the data are located. At the end of each piece of data is a link to the location of the next piece of data or an End Of Data marker. Since Solid State Memory ISN'T a hard drive, it doesn't have tracks and sectors. When Windows reads data from a Solid State device it tells the chip's on-board controller the location of the data, the controller then looks at it's own lookup table for the actual memory address and returns the data to Windows.

So Windows does not control where the controller looks for data, neither does Windows control where the chip's controller writes in the memory. So when you attempt to defrag a Solid State Memory device, Windows tells the device to write to a certain track and sector but the controller ignores the location instruction and decides for itself where to write.

That is why a defrag of Solid State Memory is a waste of time.

Hey ALL

This had been a very interesting thread.. thanks for the info. No defrag for this guy.

I use a SD card to load custom POI's to my Garmin/Kenwood G610.

POI Loader automatically creates both the Garmin and POI folders on the SD card when you run POI loader if they are not already there so no need to create the folders.

i am with you

i am with you

I have always put my POI's on an SD card. It just makes more sense to me to do it this way. Less wear and tear on the GPS for one thing. And, I agree with Juggernaut; punctuation would be nice. (Oh, and Caps would also be a good idea.)

Good tip. Thank you.

ohwogo nuvi 750

I am in the IT industry. We have harddrives that spin and we also have solid state devices where data is stored. For the harddrives, we do a re-org of the database once in a while (this is like doing defrags on your harddrive). We do NOT do re-orgs on solid state devices. The manufacturer of these devices makes sure we know NOT to defrag a solid state device. I'm sure it is the same for the GPS.

Some Garmin units do a defrag on their own in the background. This operation is not described in detail anywhere I know, so it may or may not be comparable to a hard drive defrag being discussed here.

If you have a 7x5 series nuvi, you can see the defrag stats: From the map screen, press the speed to the left of the "menu" button. Then press and hold the speedometer until you get into the diagnostic screens. Press "Next" three times to get to the "Nonvol info" screen. On the bottom of the screen you will see the defrag stats.

I don't know why some people are listening to "opinions" from users who are not experts in the matter. This member is an IT person and knows what will happen to a solid state drive if you defrag.

"Placebo effect" is right