Defragment the NAS hard drive - how it works
It is generally not advisable to defragment NAS hard drives. If you are sure of your case, this practical tip will show you how to defragment the hard drive of your NAS.
Defragment NAS hard drive - The desire for more hard drive performance
Windows operating system users in particular are familiar with hard disk defragmentation from earlier times. This helps against the problem that hard disk performance deteriorates significantly over time. By defragmenting the saved files are rearranged in order to enable a constant reading speed. Nowadays, Windows automatically defragments in the background. You can find out why you do not need to defragment your NAS hard drive in the following list.
- Windows supports the FAT32 and NTFS file systems, among others. These need defragmentation over and over again in order to remove unused memory fragments.
- The NAS systems from well-known manufacturers mostly use a Linux-based operating system. These work with the ext4 file system.
- The ext4 file system is known, among other things, for optimally arranging the data when it is written to a data carrier.
- Defragmentation is possible with ext4 - but this does not bring any noticeable performance differences and is not intended by the NAS manufacturers.
Defragment the NAS hard drive - how it works
Defragmenting NAS hard drives is neither necessary nor recommended by NAS manufacturers. However, if you often save a lot of data to your NAS, the hard disks can be minimally fragmented. There are two common ways to defragment. The first way is to use a defragmentation program - but this is complicated and prone to errors on NAS systems. We present the safe alternative in the following instructions.
- It is best to borrow an external hard drive from a friend or acquaintance. It should have enough free space so that all NAS data can be stored there. It would be even better if you bought your own external hard drive to regularly back up the NAS files there.
- Connect the external hard drive directly to the NAS. You can control them via its web interface.
- Copy the data to the hard disk using the file manager within the NAS interface. This can take a few hours.
- When the files are copied to the external hard drive, you can easily delete the data on the NAS itself. At this point, however, we recommend that you back up your NAS if possible.
- Now copy the data from the external hard drive back to the NAS. The files are analyzed before writing and ideally sorted when moving.
- When copying is complete, you have successfully defragmented your NAS hard drives.
Defragment hard drives - the technical background
Simple HDD hard drives house, among other things, a rotating metal disk and an arm inside the metal housing that can read and write files. If a file system is fragmented, this arm may have to travel longer distances. This increases the time it takes to read files. If your NAS has modern SSD hard drives - which is still very rare these days - defragmentation is not necessary.