Hello all.
I no longer work on computers and such. In the good ol' days, we would have to defragment our drives.

I have an external drive for the lone purpose of my totem downloads.

What are the thoughts about a defrag for the external drive? Is this outdated thinking? is it needed?

thanks

Everything I've read on the subject says that defrag is no longer necessary.

what kind of external drive do you use ?

if like mine, they are SSD, then you shouldn't need to.
Try Analyzing the disk(s) first to see if defrag is recommended

I have four external USB 4Tb Crucial X10 SSD and they all report 0% fragmented
My laptop also has a built-in 2Tb Samsung SSD ... also 0%

I do have the Crucial drivers installed (Win 11) but I disabled auto defrag etc.

However, if I used a regular HD and it showed heavy fragmentation ... I would defrag.

Actually Defrag of Modern HDD or Hybrid HDD is sort of counter productive.
Defragging a Modern HDD may make data access take longer than if you Don't defrag the drives.

SSD drives do not ever need to be defragmented.
Since SSD'd have a Limited number of write cycles
It just wastes Life expectancy by using up some of the write cycle life.

Read cycles are almost unlimited, But write Cycles of an SSD are in the 100,000 range.
So if you have constantly changing data, each change is reducing the Life of that area of the drives Memory.

Life expectancy of current SSD drives are in the 5 to 10 year range, depending on what and how you use them.

A boot and application Drive would be the 5 year range, due to many updates and constant changes.
where a data storage drive would probably be in the 10 year range.