Format vs. defrag

[FDA]

I'm planning on getting a couple new drives for video editing. At least one of them will be emptied regularly as I dump things to tape or recordable media of some sort. And for video, of course, I'll want to have nice clean disks. But thinking about this has made me realise there's a couple of things I don't know about disks.
1) Does emptying a drive (by deleting all files) and then writing files to it accomplish the same thing as defragging?

2) Does emptying and then formatting a drive and then writing files to it accomplish the same thing as defragging?

Either approach would be faster than defragging, saving a lot of time if defragging needed doing on a regular basis. Neither approach, of course, would do what optimizing does, but this seems less important to me than the defragging. All programs would be on a third systems disk and these two would just be data.

[aldus4]

Think of your hard drive as a bookcase. (I think this visual aid is easier to understand). You purchase more and more books and just put them in your shelf as you like. Every now and then you want a certain book, but spend a bit more time searching for it. So you start organising it and sorting the books into either alphabetical order or by theme or by colour - so that you can find them easier (we will call this process defragmenting). Of course when all is done it looks neat and you can find everything, until you start putting more books in or start to take some away.

See the formating as putting shelves up in this bookcase. Without the shelves you couldn't put any books in the bookcase.

Now as you said, should you erase everything (take out all the books) or should you re-format (take the shelves away).
Well as you know from bookshelves - the result is the same.
I think removing the shelves is somewhat faster though ...especially if the bookcase is from IKEA

[TOMMO]

If all you are going to do with the second drive is capture video footage, copy it and then dump it - FORMAT.