What would defragmentation do to a portable drive? I want PFF to be faster, but I don't want to risk hurting the USB drive.
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If PFF is slow, chances are you have an extension slowing it down (anything having to do with session saving or crash recovery kills flash drive performance). Or, you could just have a slow drive. There's about a 40x speed difference between slower flash drives and faster ones, but they're all marked USB 2.0 High Speed.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I changed the session manager's settings so that it only saves URLs and has crash recovery enabled. In USB 2.0 ports, it is a little slow, but in 1.1 or worse it is extremely slow. A defragment analysis shows defragmentation in PFF files.
BTW, I have 57 extensions (yes, a lot, but what's Fx without extensions?), and I use a SanDisk cruzer mini 1GB.
Here's a list of extensions, themes, and plugins installed (generated by MR Tech Local Install):
http://www.madhatt.com/~bahamut/My%20Config%20-%20Firefox.html
And the defrag report:
http://www.madhatt.com/~bahamut/VolumeE.txt
Vintage!
Anytime you do anything session-like, it's writing to the drive on every page load, which slows down FF. That's just the way flash ram works. Writes slow down everything. Which is why session extensions are recommended against when running from flash ram. So, you either disable them, accept that performance will be degraded, or upgrade to a faster flash drive (or hard drive).
And, yes, 57 is an excessive number of extensions. That many will slow down Firefox regardless of media.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Ok. I plan to uninstall a couple of extensions anyway, but back to the original question. Is defragmentation a good idea?
BTW, which extensions slow down Fx the most (besides TMP's session manager)?
Vintage!
You can try it, but it probably won't help much. Most of what slows you down is writes.
ANY extension that writes a lot to the key will slow things down. It's up to you to understand what the extensions you install do. There are so many (1,300+) that we're not going to take the time to analyze which ones affect portability.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
It's a good solution for Hard Disk Drives (internal as well as external), which have mechanical parts moving inside them: if a file is fragmented, the reading head has to move a lot to find all its parts. A defragmentation puts all these parts together, so that the "trips" between them is shorter.
This is not an issue with flash or Ram memory, which have no such reading heads, wherever is the last cluster accessed, accesing the one next to it or any other cluster will be as fast (or short if your device is of poor quality!
).
Moreover, defragmentation will read/write a lot on your USB device, thus shortening its life span.
A lot of people, myself included, turn off Session Manager and Crash Recovery entirely, and as John said, you have a lot of extensions.
Also, there are reports that this 1 GB drive is a little slow.
I was curious about defrag as well. I did this once I "finished" loading up my drive, and might do it after replacing a large program after an update, like OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird, but I worry that it is hard on the drive and may make little difference, as opposed to a physical drive.