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Defragging HDD's (1 Viewer)

Andy Hurley

Andy Hurley

Gotta love nature!
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Scotland
Hi,

I have two 2 Tb Seagate external HDD's where I keep, photos, music, etc. One is a copy of the other in case anything goes wrong. (Backup doesn't give an option for backing up external HDD's, so I didn't know If the stuff I had one one was being backed up or not and got no reply from Norton when I asked.) I've had them both over a year and decided to defrag them using Defraggler as I can't see the progress using Norton 360.
The fragmentation was 5% and has been running for 24 Hrs and still has 20 hrs to go.
Reading up about defragging, I see it is recommended to defrag once a week.
If I did that, it would take 3.5 days just to defrag my externals and I haven't even looked at the C:\ drive. I have the externals about half full, (maybe I should do some serious sorting out, but that will take years).

How often do you guys defrag? And why?

Also do I need to connect them directly to the WLAN so that I can access them from my or my wife's laptop? (They are currently connected to my PC via USB cables and although I have configured them so that all users have access, I can only access them from the PC.

Thanks for your help.
 
A very non-specialist answer: I don't think I have ever defragmented an external hard drive.

Niels
 
Hi defragmenting is a long slow process but once it's done if you do it regularily it will be quicker
You should be able to set a weekly schedule, maybe in the middle of the night, via Windows (assuming you are using a PC not a Mac)
Defragging should speed up loading and saving files

hope this helps
 
I have not realized a need for defragmenting an external HD. I defrag the internal one regularly.

Niels
 
Mahsleb said:
Hi defragmenting is a long slow process but once it's done if you do it regularily it will be quicker
You should be able to set a weekly schedule, maybe in the middle of the night, via Windows (assuming you are using a PC not a Mac)
Defragging should speed up loading and saving files

hope this helps
Click to expand...

Thanks Tony,
do you consider 5% heavily fragmented? I ask because I understand that the worse the fragmentation is, the longer it will take to defrag. The volume of fragged files was 50 Gb approx.
 
Andy,
My guess is that part of the reason for relatively long times is a slow read/write connection. Does your setup rely on USB1.1, 2, or 3? might make a world of difference if you can make the connection through a newer USB protocol.

Niels
 
njlarsen said:
Andy,
My guess is that part of the reason for relatively long times is a slow read/write connection. Does your setup rely on USB1.1, 2, or 3? might make a world of difference if you can make the connection through a newer USB protocol.

Niels
Click to expand...

The HDD's are USB 2 & 3 compatible, but PC is USB 2,0 (relatively old). I suppose a new USB adaptor card would fix that though. I thought USB 3.0 had different physical connectors though, so I would have to change all my plug in devices, unless of course there are USB 3.0 adaptor cards that slot into PCI slots, then I would have both. I'll have look it up.

Thanks Niels

Edit: Its more complex than I thought. The motherboard needs to be fast enough to support USB 3.0, so it will need a complete system update including PCIE architecture, which means new PC, so thats out for now.
 
Last edited:
5% is very little, I think.
Personally, I've stopped bothering to manually defrag as my HDD is never more than 70% full and the speed benefits are minimal (unless you have specific issues such as trying to edit a long movie).
 
You could well have a point there, Graeme. I just moved a lot of stuff around and deleted backup files which were huge, as they didn't include anything on the external drives. Any personal stuff, incl. photos, etc I store on the larger externals. I thought I out to clean up and defrag once I copied the 1st external drive onto the second. In retrospect, I should have just reformatted it, it would have saved hours and then the stuff being copied would have been cleaner.
 
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