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Author Topic: External Drive Clean-Up  (Read 2313 times)

ajz

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External Drive Clean-Up
« on: April 11, 2020, 11:57:57 am »

I have a couple of 6TB external HD’s which contain my LR photos. As I work in LR photos get added and deleted from LR and those drives. Over time, do those HD’s get empty spaces void of images? I recall in earlier decades we had to occasionally de-frag the HD to keep it running more efficiently. I believe my iMac does this automatically with Disk Utility on the iMac, but was wondering if these external HD’s could use periodic attention. They are in a Thunderbay 4 and NOT set up as a RAID.

Thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks

« Last Edit: April 11, 2020, 02:45:48 pm by ajz »
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rdonson

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Re: External Drive Clean-Up
« Reply #1 on: April 11, 2020, 06:41:47 pm »

Which Mac OS are you running?
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Ron

BobShaw

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Re: External Drive Clean-Up
« Reply #2 on: April 11, 2020, 07:16:33 pm »

Macs since almost the advent of OS X have not needed defragmenting as far as I know. The OS does it automatically. I certainly never do it.
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ajz

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Re: External Drive Clean-Up
« Reply #3 on: April 12, 2020, 08:53:51 am »

Thanks for the reply, but perhaps my statement was unclear. It is the external HD’s that I was asking about, not my iMac. Whether these external HD’s with my photos require a occasional de-frag, as I call it.

Over time I add and delete photos from those external drives, are there voids left here and there which reduce the drives efficiency? Do the external drives need tending?

My iMac runs on. Mojave.

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rdonson

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Re: External Drive Clean-Up
« Reply #4 on: April 12, 2020, 02:09:05 pm »

...and how are the external drives formatted???

If they are formatted to a Mac OS file system I don't think you'd need defragging.  I haven't done defragging since I left Windoze moons ago. 
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Ron

ajz

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Re: External Drive Clean-Up
« Reply #5 on: April 12, 2020, 04:07:40 pm »

I agree, Windoze was years ago doing defrag.

Anyhow, those external HD’s were originally formatted using Macs Disk Utility.  I have had no problems.

Just a curiosity if there was a reason or need to optimize the drives for efficiency purposes to help LR find photos, which could be scattered around the drive. My Mac with LR 9.2 does not run slow.  As you know, LR optimizes the Catalog using “Optimize” .   Thought that perhaps those external drives could use something similar, but never heard of anyone doing such.

Thanks

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rdonson

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Re: External Drive Clean-Up
« Reply #6 on: April 12, 2020, 09:30:06 pm »

The best the Apple has to offer now is APFS for storage.  The first release of it would only format your boot drive APFS.  Newer releases of APFS have expanded what you can do with it.  There is a lot of material online about APFS and its advantages over the old HFS+.

https://recoverit.wondershare.com/harddrive-tips/convert-external-drive-to-apple-file-system-apfs-format.html
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Ron

saiguy

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Re: External Drive Clean-Up
« Reply #7 on: April 13, 2020, 08:53:14 am »

You do not NEED to defrag, but you should. When you delete files it leaves gaps. When writing new files they can be filled in where ever there is space available. That's how they get fragmented.

What you want is Volume Optimization. This is NOT to be done on SSD drives, but on spinning disks it is very good practice. I scan slides, usually 140 in a carousel. They are on a G-RAID in mirror mode. Every time I finish one I will back it up to a LaCie drive. Then run File Defrag, which takes seconds, then run Volume Optimization, then run Volume Rebuild. I have run this routine hundreds of times with no issues. Your drive is likely to have many GB data that is very scattered. The first time you do this may take hours. But after that all data is collected into one contagious block.

Go to Micromat.com  Buy TechToolPro. They have been having discounts lately. It is the best and oldest utility for Mac only. I believe they share info back and forth with Apple engineers.

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Joe Towner

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Re: External Drive Clean-Up
« Reply #8 on: April 14, 2020, 12:21:37 pm »

Don't worry about it.  If you're keeping a decent amount of free space on the drive (couple hundred gb) the system will show minimal performance improvement by doing a defrag. As long as your LR catalog is on your iMac & that's stored on a SSD/NVMe, the external drives with the raw photos aren't going to care*.

*For large photoshop files, high mp photos where you're building previews as you try to cull a 1,500 image shoot. There are plenty of times where having your 'active' imports happening on a ssd/nvme drive, but for an average photographer having their photos on spinning rust is perfectly fine, especially if you working from the lightroom preview database on a performance drive.
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ajz

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Re: External Drive Clean-Up
« Reply #9 on: April 15, 2020, 03:14:11 pm »

Thanks for all of the comments. I could never recall this subject coming up was the reason I posted it. I recall Techtool from PC days. But, I will leave well enough alone. My drives are fine- so far and not overcrowded. My iMac is dedicated to LR and PS. Thanks for all of the comments.

ajz
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fdisilvestro

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Re: External Drive Clean-Up
« Reply #10 on: May 14, 2020, 08:21:27 am »

FYI, Windows does automatic defragmentation of spinning drives since Windows 7

saiguy

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Re: External Drive Clean-Up
« Reply #11 on: May 14, 2020, 11:04:18 am »

FYI, TechTool Pro has always been a Mac only app.
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