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Occasionally defragmenting internal IDE/EIDE/ATA/SATA/SATA2/SATA3/etc platter-based hard drives is often a recommended practice.

What about external USB/USB2/USB3 platter-based hard drives? Is it a recommended practice to defrag those as well?

Note that this question has nothing to do with USB flash drives or solid state drives (SSD).

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  • the interface used to connect the disk to the system is irrelevant, provided that it is a securely wired connection, and doesn't come detached during the operation. It can be bad to exit a defragmenter unexpectedly.
    – Frank Thomas
    Mar 18, 2016 at 5:30
  • Storage drives rarely become fragmented.
    – Moab
    Mar 19, 2016 at 0:14
  • @Moab It depends on how often data is deleted, how much data is deleted, and the sizes of the files written to the drive.
    – End Anti-Semitic Hate
    Mar 19, 2016 at 0:37

2 Answers 2

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Yes, it is perfectly safe. The file systems work in the exact same way, no matter how they are physically connected to a PC. However, I doubt you will see any performance increase from defragging USB drives, as the bandwidth is so low.

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  • TBH, defragging doesnt do much at all.
    – Keltari
    Mar 18, 2016 at 3:40
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The procedure is for maintenance of the disk itself, the data transfer protocol, be it SATA or USB, does not make a difference.

The process of defragmenting a drive moves chunks of data around on the disk to improve seek times - this movement process does involve reading a data file into RAM, and then writing it back to disk, so generally, the procedure will take much longer on an external drive because you have all the overhead of the USB protocol, and the limited bandwidth.

That being said, the process of defragmenting a drive is generally used to speed up access times on files, and really does not need to be done on an external drive if it is only used infrequently for backup storage.

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