Recently, while reading through some forums related to the Sirius S50, I came across a discussion about defragging the S50's memory. A few people seemed to be claiming that by defragging their device’s memory, many of the lock up/shut down issues were resolved and other functionality worked quicker than before. At first glance I thought to myself, "Hmm, maybe I'll try that on mine tonight," but then I realized that there is no hard drive in the S50.
Like many other MP3 players, the S50 uses flash memory, and while defragging might help a hard drive based device, the same does not hold true for flash memory. In fact, since flash memory can only be read/written to a certain number of times, the act of defragging it actually shortens its life.
Defragging hard drives makes data access more efficient because the data stored on the disk is moved around so that it is more contiguous and therefore more easily read by the drive head. Flash memory doesn’t have a single read/write head so nothing is gained by more contiguous data blocks.
As a side note, if you are a Sirius S50 owner and are experiencing lockups on scheduled recordings, try unplugging the power cord from the dock for a few minutes each day. This seems to be the method which is working best so far (hopefully the next version of firmware due out any day now will fix this… hopefully).
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