Question Defragmentation on EXFat

[AndersonJames_076]

Hi guys,
I just was loading an old USB drive into my PC to transfer files, and I noticed that when I opened the defragmenatation tool, it says "Optimization not available (File system not suported)"
So I was sondering that is defragging not available to EXFat USB drives?
Thanks!

 

[Lutfij]

If you look around you'll see how flash drives are crippled when you defragment them...SSD's included. I'm assuming you're USB drive doesn't have an HDD in it.

To answer your question;
https://support-in.wd.com/app/answe...efrag does not support exFAT formatted drives.

 

[35below0]

Hard disk drives need defragging. SSDs and flash drives do not.

 

[BFG-9000]

While you can only manually TRIM a SSD in the defragmenter (via the "optimize" button), Windows does actually automatically defrag SSDs monthly if you have System Restore enabled. This is reported as "optimized" even though it really is a defrag.

It's really not unusual for Windows' own utilities to not support later formats well or at all. For examples even the current FAT32 formatter will misalign the 1st cluster with the block size of flash drives (since those are never 512k), and historically using a 64k cluster size in FAT16 resulted in defrag or chkdsk from DOS or Win 9x not working on such volumes.

So if you want to defrag exFAT, or format a flash drive in FAT32, use a 3rd party tool.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Assuming this is a flash drive, they don't really need defragging. The random access time of flash media and flash cell management more than makes up for any issues with fragmentation.

If this is a hard drive and assuming it's a SATA one with a decent SATA to USB controller, then fragmentation isn't much of an issue as it was since SATA has a feature that can make the hard drive pick up data "out of order" to minimize travel distance across the drive. I'm too lazy to find an article I read about this, but even if the drive is 50% fragmented, performance didn't degrade that badly. I want to say the article found it needed at least 80% fragmentation before things got really bad.