Safe to defrag a Peerless 20GB USB via WinXP defrag utility?

[c***@kcc.com]

I've been using the same 20GB cartridge for a couple of years now, and
periodically run the Windows defrag analysis to see how badly it's
fragmented (answer: pretty bad). I'm tempted to do the actual defrag
but can find nothing that tells me whether or not this is a safe thing
to do. The help for MS defrag claims it can handle NTFS (which is how
my PC itself is defined) and FAT32 (which is how the Peerless unit is
defined).

(I'm a bit gun-shy on this, because I previously had an iomega Jaz
drive on which I once ran CHKDSK, and it really didn't seem to like
that....)

Has anybody done this, with good results? Any input will be much
appreciated - thanks!!!

[geothermal]

Post by c***@kcc.com
I've been using the same 20GB cartridge for a couple of years now, and
periodically run the Windows defrag analysis to see how badly it's
fragmented (answer: pretty bad). I'm tempted to do the actual defrag
but can find nothing that tells me whether or not this is a safe thing
to do. The help for MS defrag claims it can handle NTFS (which is how
my PC itself is defined) and FAT32 (which is how the Peerless unit is
defined).
(I'm a bit gun-shy on this, because I previously had an iomega Jaz
drive on which I once ran CHKDSK, and it really didn't seem to like
that....)
Has anybody done this, with good results? Any input will be much
appreciated - thanks!!!

Hi cleone,

My 2 cents of advice. Write down or store in a notepad file, the
amount of bad sectors/damage. I would then copy the contents of the
disk to the hard drive or onto another disk or some other external
hard drive, and then I would reformat the disk as that sometimes
repairs some sectors. This will erase everything. Then check to see if
the # of bad sectors is smaller than before.

I would never defrag any disk of any type on any computer unless it
said somewhere in the manual or on the company website that it was ok
to do so. I have never defragged any of my iomega disks and perhaps
that is why they have lasted over ten years. But I don't have a phd
in computers so I don't know for sure. (^:

http://www.iomega.com/support/manuals/peerless/main.html

cheers,

geothermal

[c***@kcc.com]

Hi geothermal,

Sounds like a plan - I'll give this a shot. Thanks for your
recommendation on this!!!

-- Chris