Why is my hard drive randomly trashing unselected files?

Hey all,
I've noticed that everytime i plug in my hard drive, a selection of files end up in the trash, and these are files that i have not deleted. i made the mistake of emptying the trash and lost a whole lot of files from my hard drive.
when i unplug the hd the files are no longer in the trash, but when i plug it back in the trash is full. this is a problem because the files i do delete to free up the space on my hd seem  to end up in the trash with files that i havent deleted at all, and the only way to free up space on my hd is to empty the trash. how can i resolve this problem of making sure only the files i delete are in the trash and not importrant unselected files?? Help!

Why do you even think it needs defraginng, your iMac is not an old MS Windows machine?. Defragging HD's is a very antiquated and unneccessary thing to do. Even current MS Windows machines don't need it.

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