Optimizing USB disk shared via NAS  

I've got a 1.5 TB Samsung Story Station Plus Connected to a Netgear Readynas Ultra 4 using USB 2 (606 GB used, some 129K files in 9600 folders). It is powered by external PS. The drive is shared using Netgear's software.

After adding quite a lot of new files to the drive the responce has become rather slow specially when changing folders on root level. I've read somewhere that it's not possible to optimize a network drive using the Windows utility. Anybody knows if there is a clue?

Is it for instance possible to power down the NAS, detach the drive, attach it to a USB port on another computer, run optimizing and the reconnect it to the NAS without loosing anyting on it?

Thanks!
Normor

normor said:

Is it for instance possible to power down the NAS, detach the drive, attach it to a USB port on another computer, run optimizing and the reconnect it to the NAS without loosing anyting on it?

Thanks!
Normor

Yes, should not be a problem, as long as the filesystem is one the computer can handle.

I forgot to mention that the USB disk is formatted with NTFS so that shouldn't be any problem.

On the other hand, is there any point in optimizing the disk at all? I read somewhere that the USB2 connection would be the slowest link in the chain and that it wouldn't have anything to say for the overall speed . Except that an optimization might reduce the number of read operations over time and thus wear on the disk?

Thanks a lot anyhow!

So I thought. I believe that the drive is somewhat "badly fragmented" as there has been a lot of writing files, copying, renaming files and folders and so on over the years and nothing has been done regarding optimization. I probably won't know until I've tried connecting it to another PC...

Thanks alot!