Comment on Memories of defragging your computer
finallymadeanaccount@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoI have two 10 terabyte external hard drives that go whirr (so I assume there are platters in there). Do they need a defrag? I’m running Windows 11.
Need? Probably not unless they’re nearly full. Get some benefit from? at least a little. NTFS and 11 try to keep fragmentation at bay without killing your disk. New writes that won’t fit in a hole are pushed ahead of the platter until they will.
Go run optimize drives, it’ll tell you what the state is
Thank you. Turns out Windows is maintaining everything and no action was needed.
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Defrag is usually only for drives that are written to and data deleted often, creating gaps. If it’s just storage, probably ok. I’ve got 4x 20 drives in my truenas, but it’s zfs, from what I’ve read, can’t or don’t need to defrag.