nando9811
have a little more than half a terabyte full of music, should i defrag my external hard drive? will doing so effect my mp3 files etc???? is this recommend? please help
Posté Wed 18 Jan 12 @ 2:23 pm
kradcliffe
Only if the drive is actually fragmented. Check first, however on music files defragmenting won't make any noticeable difference.
If your drive is USB2 then the data transfer speed is not that great anyway.
Keith
If your drive is USB2 then the data transfer speed is not that great anyway.
Keith
Posté Wed 18 Jan 12 @ 2:28 pm
Stievie Gonzales
I don't think it's necessary or usefull to defrag you external hard drive...
This is what i found by googling it:
"First, realize that defragmenting a drive is only a performance optimization. In other words the only reason to defragment is to increase (or maintain) the speed of your hard disk. Particularly with an external drive, the USB or Firewire interface will often be the real limiting factor on speed and defragmenting the disk will have little to no impact.
defragmenting is really also only called for if the drive is "busy". By that I mean that lots of files are being created, deleted, written to, moved around and so on, every day. That's typically not what happens on a backup drive. They get written to infrequently (when the backups happen) and that's about it.
Fortunately with most defragmenting tools, Windows built-in tools included, you can tell whether or not defragmenting even stands a chance of being helpful by running the analysis that the tools offer. I'll bet that the majority of the time there's simply no need."
This is what i found by googling it:
"First, realize that defragmenting a drive is only a performance optimization. In other words the only reason to defragment is to increase (or maintain) the speed of your hard disk. Particularly with an external drive, the USB or Firewire interface will often be the real limiting factor on speed and defragmenting the disk will have little to no impact.
defragmenting is really also only called for if the drive is "busy". By that I mean that lots of files are being created, deleted, written to, moved around and so on, every day. That's typically not what happens on a backup drive. They get written to infrequently (when the backups happen) and that's about it.
Fortunately with most defragmenting tools, Windows built-in tools included, you can tell whether or not defragmenting even stands a chance of being helpful by running the analysis that the tools offer. I'll bet that the majority of the time there's simply no need."
Posté Wed 18 Jan 12 @ 2:33 pm
JUSTNYCE2
I defrag my usb 2.o 2tb external drives 2x a month seems to keep everything especially video playback running smooth.
Posté Wed 18 Jan 12 @ 7:21 pm
drzinc
Modern OS's defrags on the fly, Vista, 7 and OSX do this. So if you are running any of thes no need to defrag manualy.
Posté Wed 18 Jan 12 @ 7:26 pm
djreventon2007
Actually your drive will last longer becuase if its fregmented the optics have to go back a forth alot more than if it wasn't fragmented.
Posté Thu 19 Jan 12 @ 5:53 pm