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Oct 01 2010

How to Improve Speed of your Smartphone Through Defragmenting

Posted in Apple, Google, iPhone, Mac, Maemo, MeeGo, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Symbian, tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

images 1 300x152 How to Improve Speed of your Smartphone Through DefragmentingDefragmenting your computer’s hard disks or other file system type such mass storage is one of the most essential task and helpful way to improve its performance. By defragmentation, it will result to the rearrangement of fragmented data (seperated files), making your disks and drives works more efficiently. So basically, defragmentation makes your computers become optimized and faster in terms on opening programs and files, and reducing all delays on its performance.

With support of your PC/computer’s defragmenter, we can also defragment other file system like removable storage devices, these includes your USB flash drives or the mass storage in your mobile phone. The benefits of this method is also the same to your computer’s hard disks defragmentation making your smartphone more optimized.

How to defragment your Nokia smartphones – Symbian and N900 / MeeGo (graphical guide available at the bottom)

  • Connect your phone to your PC via mass storage device
  • Go to My Computer window where you will see all hard disks and connected removable storage devices
  • Right click on one of the removable storage device and click properties > tools > defragment now (Microsoft Windows 7, Vista and XP are probably the same)
  • Highlight or choose the right mass storage name that you want to defrag > click Analyze > Defragment Disk

*Note: Analyzing your preferred to-be-defragmented storage systems will give you the percentage % of its fragmented files. The higher fragmented % means that you will need to defrag it. Windows recommend defragmentation on above 10% fragmented files, but making your phone’s storage systems 0% fragmented are always better.

defragmenting a cellphone How to Improve Speed of your Smartphone Through Defragmenting

Changes to phone’s performance are noticeable on my Nokia N97 mini after I defragmented the on board 8GB and external 4GB storage system (in my case only). Like browsing stored files on the storage or microSD of my mini was smoother. Defragmenting will surely help the users of N97 and N900 where large storage of data exists. You could also try this method and no worries, as you will lose nothing on defragmentation, but always remember to do necessary precautions like backing up your data.

Is this guide helpful? Please let us now on the comments below. Thanks!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 1st, 2010 at 18:04 and is filed under Apple, Google, iPhone, Mac, Maemo, MeeGo, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Symbian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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  • the_accidental

    I’m sorry, but any improvements must be imagined.

    File fragmentation just isn’t an issue on flash base storage, all defragmentation will do is wear out the flash memory sooner (it has limited write cycles).

    On a hard drive it’s only required as if you want consecutive access to two items of data and they are on different physical parts of the disk, you must wait for the disk to spin round to access the 2nd item. Defragmentation puts commonly read-together data in the same physical location (i.e. all the data in a file together) – then you don’t wait for the disk to physically move and it’s faster.

    On flash storage, in a phone, you have a true random access storage device. There is difference to access speeds from different locations, so defragmentation has no benefits. Indeed it is actually harmful to the flash, as you’re imposing more unnecessary write cycles.

  • http://nokia5230blog.blogspot.com/ joe

    i do agree with the_accidental that defragmenting as acessing data randomly in flash memory takes negligible delay and can decrease the life of the card

  • driq

    @the_accidental absolutely true.

  • http://twitter.com/jadejavu Jade Bryan

    @the_accidental

    The thing is that fragmentation was possible and already occured on the FAT32 and so defragmentation is also possible as a resort.

  • http://lloydjr.wordpress.com Lloyd

    This has helped me many times on many a Nokia device. It won’t work on a Samsung Galaxy though. That’s a Samsung fail in my book.

  • andrea p

    worked for my X6….. Was a lot faster after defragmenting, especially opening apps and scrolling the touch screen

  • http://satiousers.com Biggles

    @Jade Bryan

    No, what you saw was Windows seeing file fragments and not being able to understand there’s no point in defragmenting. What the_accidental said was spot on.

    There is NO speedup to be achieved from doing this, it’s a placebo. Flash memory has a constant access time, so there’s no benefit to having fragments contiguous to each other.

  • Glenn

    I posted the same thing on Nokia Discussions a few years ago, i noticed videos played better but i was also told i was dreaming

  • http://twitter.com/jadejavu Jade Bryan

    @Glenn

    Good to know. Improvements are not imaginary and they are noticeable on big % fragmented files esp. on big storages.

  • http://satiousers.com Biggles

    I’m sorry Glen, but something else fixed it. Jade, the improvements are imaginary, it’s not noticeable. Do your research properly on the characteristics of flash memory. It has a constant access time because there’s no moving parts. Hard disks work better after defragmenting because it stops the delay as the head moves to the correct bit of the disk. That doesn’t happen with flash memory.

    Man, the quality of this blog has collapsed lately. Think it’s time to delete the RSS link.

  • http://twitter.com/jadejavu Jade Bryan

    @Biggles
    Thanks for clarifying again. I’m still messy on blogging especially on my own articles.

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  • Quentin Tanti

    Perfect & very true.  Defragmenting the internal memory  works  wonders  and  solves the video lagging problem!  Cheers