# A note on FAT32



## marois (Dec 29, 2008)

FAT32 does not handle fragmented files very well, so always copy multiple files with a single copy command, whether using copy & paste or drag and drop. In other words, do not start a second copy&paste before the first one is done. It also a good idea to defragment the drive occasionally if you delete files. Fragmentation could be the cause of choppy playback on slower drives.


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## thewire (Jun 28, 2007)

That is true. Put some memory problems into the equation also and it becomes a real big mess fast.


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## dh2005 (Oct 27, 2008)

Defrag'ing is always a good idea, no matter what the filing system.

I defrag'ed my laptop's C: drive last month, because I hadn't done it in a while. In the previous couple of weeks I'd been doing lots of DVD ripping/remuxing/etc., which necessitated lots of writing and deleting. After the defrag, I clawed back almost 3GB of drive space. On an NTFS drive.


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## agayton (Jan 14, 2009)

Defragging is good on hard drives but for those of you with solid state drives, don't do it. There is no performance gain, only wear on the drive.


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## nova (Apr 30, 2006)

Yes, seems like an oxymoron considering a solid state device has no moving parts :bigsmile: To be a bit more precise, the Solid State / RAM-drive or SSD does not exactly wear out. It's the Flash Memory Cells that do and is a result of charge trapping characteristics or the dielectric breakdown characteristics of the tunnel oxide. The number of erase/write cycles that a flash array can achieve while retaining data integrity is usually greater than 100,000 cycles. There are a few other problems with these devices such as stuck cells caused by charge trapping , single bit failures due to leakage currents, and data retention vs. temperature ie: the hotter it is and longer it runs the quicker it will fail. Of course even a very conservative number is 100 years so it should not really be a concern,though files can still be fragmented as the clusters occupy data locations that are physically apart from each other so you may still want to defrag an SSD every 6 months or so..... and we really kinda went off topic :bigsmile:


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