iPhone and data fragments

[-aggie-]

Does deleting a song or ringtone on the iPhone leave a data fragment? I'm talking about when you use the checkbox selected to "Manually manage your music and videos." I was just wondering if anyone knew how the file structure works for the iPhone and that if you manually delete then you leave fragments that might make your flash drive have less space than is actually available.

 

[Krevnik]

You mean filesystem fragmentation? Yeah, the iPhone's filesystem will fragment.

However, this is not a big deal when it comes to flash media. You get a big hit on HDDs because of the seek time. As files stop being on the disk in a sequential manner, you take a hit every time you have to seek. For flash (and SSDs for the most part as well), sequential and random reads take the same time either way, so filesystem fragmentation is not a big deal.

Either way, fragmentation will not reduce the available space (make it seem like there is less available than there really is)... What will happen is new files will be split into multiple parts in storage. This is exactly the same thing that happens with desktop/laptop storage.

 

[-aggie-]

You mean filesystem fragmentation? Yeah, the iPhone's filesystem will fragment.

However, this is not a big deal when it comes to flash media. You get a big hit on HDDs because of the seek time. As files stop being on the disk in a sequential manner, you take a hit every time you have to seek. For flash (and SSDs for the most part as well), sequential and random reads take the same time either way, so filesystem fragmentation is not a big deal.

Either way, fragmentation will not reduce the available space (make it seem like there is less available than there really is)... What will happen is new files will be split into multiple parts in storage. This is exactly the same thing that happens with desktop/laptop storage.

Thanks for the informative reply!