defragmenting

[zedselder]

i have a 1tb sata 3gb/s hdd internal and i never defragmented it, its used storage only. now im building this new pc it has 2 wd 4tb black in raid0, what i wanna know should i defragment the data before copying or when i copy it it will defragment it self? 

[wyattzx]

You should defragment hard drives about.. once a week for lots of data, or once a month for lightly-used drives. Defragment the drive after you finish all of your files transfers, and then do it again a week or two after. Then make that a routine.

[pwn_intended]

The data will defrag itself through the copy onto the new drive. The old drive will however still be fragmented.

Defragging weekly is a little bit aggressive. once a month should be way more than enough for 99% or people. And totally overkill if youre just using it as a media dump and not erasing things all the time.

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Hi there @dexzizo!

 

If you move files from one drive to another, whether the new copy is fragmented depends on what is on the new location. Since the destination drives are clean, new and unused, then the files will not be fragmented in their new location. Your OS will find the next available open space to fit the file into when you copy it from one drive to the next, which means that your OS would take a heavily fragmented file, for instance, and make it whole again in the new location.

 

So basically, the fragmentation on the source doesn't affect the fragmentation of the destination, so you can transfer the files without defragmenting the old drive first.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Cheers!