How much Difference Does Defragmentation Make?

Hi Friends,

I found this link about defragmentaion here. Is it true what’s written here? Does it make any difference in case of a NAS?

 Sorry for the late reply Jaquan. Former relatively low level IT guy for SOHO and small to medium businesses. Mostly Microsoft stuff. Any advice from me is opinions and training from that experience, and my own hobbie stuff.

  So, lets say a boiler plate Rockstor NAS with mechanical data drives in typical 2-4 drive Raid array.
  You use it for storing your home videos and PC file backups. When you drag and drop files from a fragmented PC harddrive to a NAS they get defragmented in the move. And reading files typically doesnt cause fragmentation.

  So will it happen? Sure. Would you notice if a media streaming drive is fragmented? Actually probably not. Even 4k video plays through data much slower than a mechanical harddrrive is capable of. Something like 5-10 MegaBytes per second Vs a hardrive going at 150MBps. So even heavily fragmented say 50% performance theres just no way. 

 That being said a fragmented drive does make a drive work harder. So I think most people run a scheduled optimise and balance periodically. I do that once a month.

All that said it is totally different if we are talking about the OS drive. But most people have those on small ssds or usb sticks. Where fragmentation is a non-issue

regards