Hi Walt,

Oh brother, that is the biggest load of crap I've ever heard. Hard drives do not develop issues when you exceed 50% of capacity. Read/Writes are random access. the drive doesn't know when it's full or not. The Hash tables that contain the directory information can contain much more information then they are usually allocated. Sounds like you may have bad sectors on the drive. Reformatting the drive will discover those sectors and ensure they are not used any further. Hard disks keep a hash table of bad sectors. Defragmenting will not find bad sectors, it will only rearrange chunks of data to be more sequential to enable access to be faster; not more reliable.