External Hard Drive Questions

[الله أكبر]

1) Should I ever de-frag my external hard drive? I de-frag my computer on a regular basis, but have never de-fragged the X-HD for fear of fucking something up and losing all my movies and music.

2) If and when I get a MacBook (), will I be able to transfer music files from the X-HD to the MacBook, since the X-HD is formatted for FAT32 (or something like that)?

[TemporalRift]

I believe whether or not you have to defrag your external drive depends on if it's flash or platter. If you spent a lot of money on it and it's not that very sizable, like 4 or 8 gigs then it's Flash and you shouldn't need to defrag it. If it's 40-200 gigs then it's platter and you should probably defrag it. As long as it stays plugged in to your computer and power source nothing should go wrong during the defrag.

[Violent Unrest in Allentown]

http://www.pcdoctor-guide.com/wordpress/?p=2619

"No, I wouldn't recommend that you defrag an external hard drive that's used as a backup media.  The performance gains will be minimal and there's a risk that something will go wrong and you damage your backups.

Also, I'd go as far as to suggest that if your external hard drive is a backup medium that you should keep it switched off until it's needed.  That way it's less likely to suffer hardware failure and it's also protected from viruses."

[الله أكبر]

Many thanks to you both.