Defragment question

Patty O Furniture

Hi,

My question is that i was moving a few 2 different file sizes 750MB -1.5GB file from a portable HDD to a 32GB flash drive one was est time of 27m & the other was 23hrs? but the 2nd took quicker after the 1st one was copied over.

Do i need to defrag the portable HDD?

I've also heard of 3rd party like Defraggler would do a better/quicker job than the Windows bulit in one would do?

Thanks for any help appreciated.

STEINBERG

You kind of answered your own question, the drive can only do so much at any one time. What happened you is pretty standard.

You can even test this, for example take 3 random files and try to send them all to the one drive at the same time, with some drives the 3rd file will not even start transfer until one of the first two have finished.

Best way to do this is to do one file at a time.

coylemj

You can get Windows to see if it's worth defragging the portable HDD. Attach the drive and click Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Defragmenter Then select the drive and windows will tell you if it's worth it.

As advised above, there's no point in copying multiple files at a time, that in itself probably leads to fragmentation. Only one read/write head can be active at a time so you need to copy files in sequence, not in parallel.

Patty O Furniture

coylemj wrote: »

You can get Windows to see if it's worth defragging the portable HDD. Attach the drive and click Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Defragmenter Then select the drive and windows will tell you if it's worth it.

As advised above, there's no point in copying multiple files at a time, that in itself probably leads to fragmentation. Only one read/write head can be active at a time so you need to copy files in sequence, not in parallel.

Thanks, after analysing the C drive, its only 1% fragmented & portable HDD is @0%, so i'll be more patient anymore copying, although i never saw that est time of 27m - 23hrs come up before, as it did worry me!