Need? Probably not unless they’re nearly full. Get some benefit from? at least a little. NTFS and 11 try to keep fragmentation at bay without killing your disk. New writes that won’t fit in a hole are pushed ahead of the platter until they will.
Go run optimize drives, it’ll tell you what the state is
I have two 10 terabyte external hard drives that go whirr (so I assume there are platters in there). Do they need a defrag? I’m running Windows 11.
Need? Probably not unless they’re nearly full. Get some benefit from? at least a little. NTFS and 11 try to keep fragmentation at bay without killing your disk. New writes that won’t fit in a hole are pushed ahead of the platter until they will.
Go run optimize drives, it’ll tell you what the state is
https://www.elevenforum.com/t/optimize-and-defragment-drives-in-windows-11.3212/
Thank you. Turns out Windows is maintaining everything and no action was needed.