Defragging a flash drive

[vistadude]

I hope this doesn't sound like a stupid question, but I have never defragged my flash drive. When I do the hard-drive, the additional drives show up in the window.

So I am wondering if it is safe to defrag a flash drive too.

I only ask because I have important data backed up and I am scared to death of losing it.

[SpearMan]

The simple answer is no. The whole defrag process is done through a read/write head that rearranges your files and places them back together for you. That way, when you need to access a certain file, everything is put back together and your computer doesn’t have to work as hard to find what you’re looking for. On the other hand, flash drives do not have a read/write head, so if you were to defrag one, you wouldn’t get any extra performance benefits from it whatsoever.