How to defrag a hard drive on NAS to fix unusual hard drive formatting

How to defrag a hard drive on NAS to fix unusual hard drive formatting

It appears that any hard drive on a NAS network uses some mysterious type of formatting. How do you defrag it? How do you recover files in an event the drive is unreadable?

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If a drive is used in a NAS device, you should never have to defrag it. The drive is under control of the NAS software and it will manage it. Also, the recovery of files should be based on what protection you've implemented. Have you used remote replication? Have you made a mirror copy somewhere else? If it's a specific drive problem, then most NAS devices use RAID to protect from that and should automatically make the data available.

For more information, read expert Christopher Poelker's advice on how to defrag a hard drive on NAS.

This was first published in November 2004