I have a 14tb HDD that's 90% full and windows says 80% fragmented. Running a defrag is taking days with no end in site..
Will it be quicker if I move the data off to another drive, then copy it back. Would the data automatically be copied back in a defragmented way?
Last edited by bobsagetfullhou; 24 Oct 2021 at 00:37.
I don't know about 'quicker' but yes, moving off and copying back should result in un-fragmented files.
There is a third possibility. The more free space on an HDD, the more efficient defragmentation will be. Your 10% free space is below Microsoft's recommendation of at least 15% free space. More would be better, say 30% or more. You could move some files off to make more free space, defrag the drive, then move the files back.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...ommands/defragMicrosoft said:
yesWill it be quicker if I move the data off to another drive, then copy it back.
Housekeeping is easier if the partitions are manageable sizes.
I had the same problem with my 12TB external hard drive. I noticed there was a problem when my backup program estimated it would take over 24 hours to back up my 2 x 2TB internal SSDs. It showed over 80% fragmented. What made it worse was that several of the backup files were over 1TB in size. De-fragmenting seem to stall even after several days at 20%. Even deleting the older backups so the drive was down to 20% used did not seem to help. I ended up deleting all the backups and creating new backups.
BTW, I may have tried copying the files to another drive and copying them back. The files would then no longer be fragmented. I had already wasted too much time on this so it was time to move on. Also, my backup program had not run in over a week so it was past time to start it again.
If you are using SMR disks it will be slow with all that writing involved.
I would avoid them like the plague. CMR is much much better.
They snuck them out at first. After a lot of complaints, they admitted it, covered with marketing BS. WD and Seagate were both at it. They are still selling the awful things. Check very carefully before buying.
Seagate says Network Attached Storage and SMR don’t mix | Ars Technica
Last edited by SIW2; 24 Oct 2021 at 01:52.
That depends whether you are just defragmenting or also optimizing files? Optimizing moves the most used files to the faster part of the drive, but if you move all files, it will make optimizing pointless.
By the way you can defragment Windows outside of Windows, it will be much faster since nothing is running.
Boot Windows USB - Repair - Troubleshoot - CMD - type/enterCode:c: cd windows cd system32 defrag c: /u
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