Cleaning up Archive drive

[frailer]

Have a 1TB. 'F' drive external attached to out Windows_Server 2003 (XMF). We Archive off selectively to a proprietary (I assume) format, from which we can Restore jobs to the active list if needed.
Just done a big culling of files, as was up to about 800+GB. Despite serious culling, it hasn't dropped dramatically. In Tools it's very frag'd., which I'd expect, but would I need to copy off remaining files onto another external, re-format, copy back, in order to get that real estate back? Am guessing that those sectors are just too frag'd to be available.   :undecided:

[Joe]

Could be not enough free space on the drive to defrag I suppose. Probably as fast to copy everything off, reformat, and copy back. And safer too IMO. Never been a fan of defragging. Lost too much data in my life.

[frailer]

I'll keep going on the culling, but am not optimistic it will show much more Available. There's a spare port in the powered USB hub, so looks like an OWC 1TB, then do just that.
Basic question, as PCs spook me, probably unnecessarily. Do I just select/drag/drop over once the new one is hooked up? I hate messin' with our server, but no choice on this one.

[Joe]

Really, even if the drive is fragmented, you should still see the space recovered. I would eject the drive, unplug it, wait 30 seconds, plug it back in and you should see the recovered space in amount of available disk space.

[Joe]

I'll keep going on the culling, but am not optimistic it will show much more Available. There's a spare port in the powered USB hub, so looks like an OWC 1TB, then do just that.
Basic question, as PCs spook me, probably unnecessarily. Do I just select/drag/drop over once the new one is hooked up? I hate messin' with our server, but no choice on this one.

Yes, drag-n-drop should work just fine for copying files.

[frailer]

Just ordered a 1TB Mercury Elite pro from OWC. A bit dearer, but I've had a crappy WD Book drive fail. Don't want to go there again.