Comments for Should I maintain my external drive the same way I do my internal?

Comment from Terese on 2008-10-15

2008-10-15T18:51:28Z

I have a 500g Seagate. Last night i attempted to run a back up [i use Ghost] and it said my drive was full. So when i checked 'properties' indeed, it almost was. So i deleted A LOT of the older back-ups, ranging from 37-41gig each, and still, it said there wasn't enough room.

Again, i checked the properties, and the available volume had not changed. So, now i tried 'disk cleanup'. It emptied the recycle bin, i had no idea the ext. drive had one ... but now it's been working on deleting the 'compressed files' [again, i didnt know they were there] but it's been HOURS and not much change. [the progress bar on the clean up window is only at 1 bar after more than 3 hrs.]

Is this normal?

I've also attempted a 'defrag' but again, windows said there is not enough room to do so. [i'm running XP home]

It does seem some utilities do not work the same on an external drive.

Thanks,

Terese

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A comment on: Should I maintain my external drive the same way I do my internal?

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Comment from Leo on 2008-07-08

2008-07-08T22:57:43Z

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Unfortunately what "too full" means depends *entirely* on
how you use the drive - there's no single answer. Could be
OK to be at exactly 100% capacity, could be bad to have if
only 50% empty.

How will you know? Something that attempts to use the drive
will fail because there's not enough room to do whatever it
wants to do. Perhaps you can't backup. Perhaps you can't
save a file. Perhaps defrag doesn't complete like you want
it to. Perhaps many other things.

Sorry there's really no better answer or reecommendation.

Leo

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A comment on: Should I maintain my external drive the same way I do my internal?

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Comment from Drew Phillips on 2008-07-06

2008-07-07T00:02:24Z

Nice article Leo. I am wondering about the comment "when it gets too full". Well, how is this determined? Exactly what is too full? And how will one be notified of this status? About 8 years ago, back when recordable CD drives were still around $450 or so and media was expensive, I did not have the means to back up a secondary storage drive that I had filled to around 80% capacity. It started having problems reading data, and crashed with no recovery option, unless I wanted to spend $1500 (a lot of greenbacks in those days). As it is now, I keep my secondary disk(s) at around 50% storage capacity, but this is a layman's approach. I have not been able to find any info on external or secondary disk storage recommended limits, so I thought I'd ask you you know what they are or what the generally accepted limits are?

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A comment on: Should I maintain my external drive the same way I do my internal?

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Comment from Leo A. Notenboom on 2008-02-06

2008-02-06T17:26:33Z

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I've not heard that. I'd expect 'em to be fine on Vista, XP
whatever.

As for brands ... that tends to change from year to year. I
have two Maxtors I'm quite happy with, and two Western
Digitals. The WDs are the first time I've had one fail
within a short time, though. It was recoverable (using
SpinRite), and the drive is still in use and appears solid.

Leo

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A comment on: Should I maintain my external drive the same way I do my internal?

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Comment from danny on 2008-02-05

2008-02-06T00:00:37Z

Hi,
I read that laptop external drives don't won't well with Vista. Is this true? Secondly, what external drives (desktop or laptop) do you recommend? I am trying to choose between the Western Digital My Book Edition 500GB ($129.99 at Costco or the Seagate Pro Agent 750GB ($199 at Costco). Please help.

Thanks,
Danny.

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A comment on: Should I maintain my external drive the same way I do my internal?

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Comment from Adrian Barrett on 2008-01-21

2008-01-21T18:09:08Z

I run a small free utility on my system called "IOBit smartdefrag" which runs automatically in the background and keeps my main drive up to speed. As Linux looks after it's own drives in it's own way as standard I though it was strange that Windows had nothing similar and the hard drives always degenerated the files and fragmentation.

I personally would have belived that todays massive hard drives wouldn't suffer so much clogging of its file system, but then all the tiny files for windows and many programs are on my C Drive after all...!

(I always double and triple check comments and independent reviews before using freeware

Check this out -
http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html >>

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Comment from Packrat1947 on 2008-01-18

2008-01-19T04:35:20Z

If it ever comes down to data recovery, then defragged files are much more likely to be recovered. Some products like PerfectDisk allow defragging without opimization.

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A comment on: Should I maintain my external drive the same way I do my internal?

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Comment from Carl R. Goodwin on 2008-01-18

2008-01-19T02:32:22Z

I have found that when I try to only defrag my USB external drive, Windows decides to defrag the main drive too. I select only the external USB drive to defrag, but after a little while, it stops spinning, and yet Windows says that it is still defragging. It's kind of annoying, because I write to that drive all day every day, and hardly ever write to the main drive, so therefore, have no need to defrag it. Windows!

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A comment on: Should I maintain my external drive the same way I do my internal?

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