Your input on defragmentation

[DOS4EVER]

I am using a 6 TB hard drive for all of my media files including live and recorded tv. I have about 30 GB of music videos and I have also ripped over a hundred blu ray movies to the drive. Is it necessary to perform a defragmentation? My guess would be no since I'm only using it for streaming media and the fact that a defrag would probably take all day to complete. What do you think?

[webminster]

If it's Windows, not an SSD, and you write and delete from it, IMHO generally yes. If you're not writing to it (recording, Live TV, etc) it probably wont get very fragmented. If you haven't run a defrag on it in a long time, it probably will take a while. You can always run the defrag utility and analyze the disk, will tell you how fragmented it is. I run a defrag on the recording drive on my system weekly during a couple hours when I know the machine will be idle. Just the HDDs, not the SSDs.

[DOS4EVER]

Okay, thanks.

[CyberSimian]

I am using a 6 TB hard drive for all of my media files including live and recorded tv.

One thing that you might want to think about is the question of what block size to use for the disk when you format it. The block size is the size of the allocation unit. By default, Windows uses a block size of 4 KBytes. That is a good choice for a disk that contains a random selection of files. But for a disk that contains mostly or exclusively large files (such as audio or video files), a larger block size would be advantageous.

On my recordings disk, I use a block size of 64 KBytes. This reduces by a factor of 16 the size of the block allocation tables that Windows must maintain, makes it quicker to allocate blocks for new files, and reduces fragmentation.

Of course, you can choose the block size only when you format the disk, which will destroy any existing content on the disk. So possibly not practical for your existing disk, but you might want to consider using a larger block size on future disks.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[DavidinCT]

I am using a 6 TB hard drive for all of my media files including live and recorded tv. I have about 30 GB of music videos and I have also ripped over a hundred blu ray movies to the drive. Is it necessary to perform a defragmentation? My guess would be no since I'm only using it for streaming media and the fact that a defrag would probably take all day to complete. What do you think?

If your using WIndows 7 or above, Just use auto defrag in windows....

That is what I do on my machine and every time I run a check on it, it's never fragmented. Windows will do it when there is no use on the system.

Just dont attempt to defrag a ssd, it wont help, if anything it could slow it down over time.