Defragment with Garmin 350

 

I noticed that the Nuvi 350 cannot be defragmented. That makes, sinse since there would be no way to do this without connecting to your PC. It cannot be done when connected to a PC either. This must be the reason why you cannot simply add a few location to your red light camera list. Your have to replace the whole file. If this were not so, the GPS would start to run slower after frequent file upgrades.
I'm not 100% sure of this, but it seems to be what I see.

I've defragged just fine

My previous Nuvi 350, and my current 660. Takes quite a while though. Have used the standard defragger that comes with WindowsXP & Vista, and - DiskKeeper on the Vista laptop...did not do anything special, just selected the drive letter for the Nuvi's internal storage and let the utility do its thing.

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*Keith* MacBook Pro *wifi iPad(2012) w/BadElf GPS & iPhone6 + Navigon*

Well, mine (the nuvi 350 and

Well, mine (the nuvi 350 and the previous C530) couldn't defrag the map file, it is too big, unless someone knows away around it. I did it on the 530 by formatting and then putting the files back on, but that is when I started to have map drawing issues, so I am a bit relucant to do it again.

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Charley - Nuvi 350 - Bel STI Driver - Cobra 29 w/ wilson 1000 - AIM: asianfire -

I would not defrag my GPS.

I would not defrag my GPS. First off there is no need to defrag since all the GPSs I know have RAM memory and not a hard drive. You will not notice a performace difference. Defraging is just excessive write access to memory locations. Garmin will never tell you but all RAM devices that can store data with out power have a write failure threshold. It's very high and is probably longer then the device will be used, but excessive defrags may shorten the life of your GPS.

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eTrex Touch 35, Nuvi 1350LMT, Nuvi 350, Nuvi 260, Garmin GPS III, Basecamp

Yeah, I have't seen any

Yeah, I have't seen any performance difference with it being all fragmented.

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Charley - Nuvi 350 - Bel STI Driver - Cobra 29 w/ wilson 1000 - AIM: asianfire -

I Concur

thetick wrote:

I would not defrag my GPS. First off there is no need to defrag since all the GPSs I know have RAM memory and not a hard drive. You will not notice a performace difference. Defraging is just excessive write access to memory locations. Garmin will never tell you but all RAM devices that can store data with out power have a write failure threshold. It's very high and is probably longer then the device will be used, but excessive defrags may shorten the life of your GPS.

But - there is a known issue I've seen discussed - and that is the directory structure can become corrupt - so, while defragging is not really necessary, using a utility to check for, and repair those kinds of issues is not a bad thing to do once in a while.

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*Keith* MacBook Pro *wifi iPad(2012) w/BadElf GPS & iPhone6 + Navigon*

I agree but chkdsk is a

I agree but chkdsk is a different beast then defrag. If your drive is corrupt then I would run chkdsk, but running chkdsk otherwise is foolish. Running defrag anytime is foolish.

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eTrex Touch 35, Nuvi 1350LMT, Nuvi 350, Nuvi 260, Garmin GPS III, Basecamp

Tell Us Why

thetick wrote:

Running defrag anytime is foolish.

Why is running defrag anytime foolish? When you have files scattered all over the hard drive, it puts them back in the proper place, and why would it be included in System Tools if it wasn't sometimes necessary?

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Garmin 660

First your GPS's memory is

First your GPS's memory is non-volatile RAM not a hard drive. RAM stands for RANDOM access memory so defraging will not improve access time. As I stated above defraging does a tremendous amount of writes. RAM memory has a write threshold which is very high, but a large number of defrags may shorten the life of your GPS's memory.

Finally Defrag is great for hard drives not non-volatile RAM. I know of no GPSs with hard drives ,but if there are then defrag would be useful for those devices.

Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVRAM for more information.

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eTrex Touch 35, Nuvi 1350LMT, Nuvi 350, Nuvi 260, Garmin GPS III, Basecamp

Clarification

thetick wrote:

I agree but chkdsk is a different beast then defrag. If your drive is corrupt then I would run chkdsk, but running chkdsk otherwise is foolish. Running defrag anytime is foolish.

Note this is for non-volatile RAM and not a hard drive. Sorry for any confusion since I did use "drive" above which should have been "RAM drive".

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eTrex Touch 35, Nuvi 1350LMT, Nuvi 350, Nuvi 260, Garmin GPS III, Basecamp