#Run idefrag from thumbdrive free

So.is it safe? Or should I just leave it alone?Īs a general rule of thumb, NTFS volumes (at least non compressed ones) work just fine, fragmented or not fragmented, until they have less than 15% or 10% of free space available, than performance starts to degrade noticeably.īut this is 'old school' advice and the percentages - besides being as said a rule of thumb - came out when disks were much smaller than they are today. And if a crash or some other error occurs during the defrag, that could mean corruption of data that was otherwise OK before. Of course, this won't increase available space. This has led me to believe that maybe defragging to consolidate fragmented files might help. But when they were empty the read/write speeds were much faster. And each of these drives have native NTFS compression enabled (not really necessary, but it helps to squeeze out all the capacity I can get), which does slightly decrease speed (not significantly, in my experience, but it depends on the drive). Obviously writing will become slower since there is very little available space. The main issue is that both reading and writing to these drives has become somewhat slow, much slower than USB 3.x speeds. Most are either at or nearing capacity, I use them for archiving files that I either don't need to access often, or don't need to store on my internal drives. I have a handful of large 5TB to 10TB external HDDs, all of which are either USB 3.0 or USB 3.1. Not much explanation needed, question is exactly what the thread title says.