Storage Tools for Pocket PC

[marlof]

<a href="http://www.softwinter.com/storagetools.html">http://www.softwinter.com/storagetools.html</a><br /><br />SoftWinter - known for the Sentry 2020 data encryption product - has announced its new product for storage cards, StorageTools.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/st.gif" /><br /><br />With Storage Tools, you can get information on disk usage, fragmentation, FAT allocations, you can perform a verify and repair, format cards, and - if you opt for the payware version - defragment your cards.<br /><br />The price depends on your usage for the product: Format and Scan functionality free for personal non-commercial use. Format, Scan and Defrag - US$14.95, includes lifetime free upgrades.

[Pony99CA]

I have to wonder how much of a problem fragmentation is in RAM. On a disk, with head seek time and rotational delay, keeping files allocated neatly can really improve performance, both for reading and writing.

However, with electronic memory, reading probably won't be much slower. Writing to fragmented RAM would probably be a little slower if the operating system has to search a free list for available storage blocks, but it shouldn't be nearly as slow as writing to a disk. (By that, I mean relatively. I've heard claims that a Microdrive is faster than a CF card, but I mean that the Fragmented I/O Time to Non-Fragmented I/O time ratio is smaller for RAM than disk.)

Softwinter's Web page included a quotation saying that defragmenting could improve performance more than a hardware upgrade, but I wonder if that quotation referred to disks or PDAs. If it referred to disks, that quotation is out of context and very misleading, I think.

I welcome Softwinter to post performance statistics on fragmented vs. non-fragmented memory I/O.

Steve

[Shapeshifter]

If you want a bit more than just flash card specs etc, I'd suggest you to try DEXplor (http://www.dex-plor.com), the most advanced file manager ever. Its cheaper too, and there is a free demo. It's worth a shot, trust me!

[Chubbergott]

I have read somewhere that defragging RAM <U>does</U> actually make a small difference (even though there are no heads - though Microdrive users will no longer have to use their PCMCIA card to defrag their drives with this). I had such a tool for my Psion5 & 5mx and used it quite regularly.

I think this price is quite reasonable as well!

[a.morreale]

Pony99CA makes a good point: solid-state devices have no moving parts so defragging CF, MMC, or SD cards doesn't give any real benefit. This applies both to reading and writing, as memory addressing is the same whatever the "logical cluster" involved (and free clusters can be found quickly through the FAT).

Reading or writing sector 1 and 2, or, instead, reading and writing sector 1 and 1000 doesn't make any difference on solid state devices, because memory addressing works exactly the same, while of course it does make a difference on mechanical devices such as MicroDrives.

The point is: would you defrag your 1GB or 5GB MicroDrive on your Pocket PC while on battery power?
I guess you wouldn't: and if you are at home or in the office, you would probably prefer to use your PC anyway, as this will also make the whole operation quite a lot shorter.

[Coordinator]

Defragmenting FAT on flash cards will improve performance.

When the file is fragmented, every read/write operation
requires jumping all over FAT table to locate which physical
cluster corresponds to the particular place in file.

After defragmentation FAT table contains single compressed
record for the file, and getting physical cluster is a fast, linear
operation.

The actual data read/write is indeed no faster on memory storage
as it is on disks.

But defragmentation is still worth it, because of the cluster lookup
speed improvement.

[dma1965]

I downloaded this only for the defrag options, but after waiting for 2 hours to defrag my 128 meg SD card, I gave up. Too slow, and defrag is all I wanted. It takes minutes to pull the card out and defrag it on my laptop trhough my card reader. Oh well, nice try. The free format functions are cool though, for those that do not wish to shell out the $ for FlashFormat. 8O

[berzins]

Hi guys. Well I downloaded this application (Storage Works), and tried to do a format on my 128MB SD card. Well now I can't access it. I even donwloaded DEXplor to see if it could format the card and all I get is "Unable to open drive: \Storage Card\Vol: Error code: 5". Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? I hope I did not hose the card. Any information would be great!

Dave...