Just out of curiosity Mac, I did a bit of online research and it's appears both you and Eddie are right. Like so many things, the correct answer is "it depends". I found several articles and posts in forums saying what Eddie is saying, newer systems with fast esata drives don't need defragging and it might make things worse but older ones running XP might benefit from it. One Avid audio/video forum specifically said do not defrag because their software puts some kind of tag on the data chunks and defragging will mess that up and several posters on a couple of pro audio forums said the same thing. One guy on a video forum who's credentials looked impressive said no way should you defrag a big HD with a bunch of large video files while other's said no, for disc streaming defragging is sometimes necessary. It appears to be a common question with strong opinions on both sides.

I certainly don't have time to research this in depth, just throwing what I found out there. I do think that if we're talking a new PC, perhaps we should think twice before defragging. There seems to be a potential for damage to the data. One guy had an interesting take, he said just copying the data to a new HD automatically puts the chunks back together and you can then do a copy/replace back to your original drive without running any defraggers. Hadn't thought of that one, sounds elegant if true.

Bob

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