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#1
Defragmenting large drives?
In the days when drives were measured in Gigabytes, a full defrag was do-able, lasting an hour or two, or sometimes overnight. But what do folks do with larger drives these days? I have a drive with getting on for 2TBs of data on it. I imagine my PC will run for days trying to defrag that... (It's not too bad as yet - 11% fragmented, apparently, but that figure won't get better of course).
The drive contains terrain data (Ortho4XP) for X-Plane 11 (flight simulator) and as such is regularly read by X-Plane. There tens of thousands of files, about 10MBs each. Clearly if the drive (here an external USB HDD) gets too fragmented, reading of the files and performance will be affected.
Any suggestions for a quick, painless defrag? I have been Googling but not sure whether I am reading hyperbole or the truth a lot of the time about various applications' abilities.
One method recommended as 'best' is to copy all the data to another drive, format the original and then copy it all back again. I do have a second 2TB drive onto which I back up all the terrain data, so that would be feasible, as I already have the copy. But would that produce a fully unfragmented result? Can't decide if that would be the 'best' method or not...
I used to defragment my drives regularly, but now that my HDDs are so large, and the rest of my drives are SSDs, I have lost the habit: things may have moved on in the meantime, technologically speaking! (Is defragging all that data actually safe, hardware-wise, BTW? Or even strictly necessary with NTFS??).
Thanks.