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Any reason not to defrag 8TB HDD?

April 11th, 2017, 14:08

I've got an 8TB Seagate drive and, knowing that it uses Shingled Magnetic Recording, I wonder if there's any reason not to defragment it, like some hidden aspect of shingled recording that I should be aware of, that might make it bad to re-order blocks. I know that for each change to a sector, the drive has to read 2 tracks and rewrite them again, although the 128 MB cache is supposed to help. Thanks in advance.

Re: Any reason not to defrag 8TB HDD?

April 11th, 2017, 14:46

Unless the drive has ever been full and had a lot of small files deleted, followed by the addition of other large files, it's highly unlikely that the drive needs to be defragmented. There's no reason to bother, and it'll be painfully slow on an SMR drive.

The better question is: any reason to defrag an 8TB HDD?
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