Defragging..............Either It Is, or It Isn't!!

I have been defragging my computers once a month using Windows defragger. If it was hurting my machines they all would be dead by now, my oldest is 8 years old and it is still going strong and I actually updated it to Windows 7 recently by adding memory and swapping out the graphic card for one that works with 7

The others are from 5, 6, 2 and 1 year old

Defragging is like cleaning out your brain, you are cleaning out and re organizing all the files (like your brain cells)
which makes the HD (like your brain) run smoother :P

I will keep it simple because that's me. Fragmentation is when one program or application ect. was installed and there wasn't one complete space on the hard drive to put all of it. So the operating system puts pieces here and there. When you ask you computer to use program (A) it has to search for it. Of course it is going to have to search in several places on the hard drive because that is the way program (A) was installed. That slow things down; the spinning of the disc and the little arm jump all over looking for the pieces parts of program (A). When you defrag a hard disc the defrag programs looks for all these little pieces to Program (A) and tries to put them all in the same place all together. So next time you want to use program (A) the system finds everything in one place. Microsoft in designing Windows 7 has some how made it so it doesn't get fragment as much as the older system. Defrag is always good but it does vary in degrees. That is why Windows 7 defrag gives you a method of checking your hard drive to see how much defrag has occoured. I can't remember any time my hard drive computer with Windows 7 ever got over 3 or 4% fragmented. With that little of fragmentation doing a de frag would show very little increase in speed. If a system with a hard drive got say 15 to 20 % fragmented you would notice a difference in speed. It would also depend on the rpm of the hard drive and other things but I said I would keep it simple. Not short.
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Now to answer you questions.
The wear and tear on the hard drive because of doing a defrag use to be in question. Todays quality hard drives in my opinion it doesn't hurt them.
The less time a hard drive has to spin up and hunt and peck for things that are fragmented all over the hard drive more than compensates for the wear done by defragging. If I found my hard drive fragmented lets say 20% I would defrag more often so it wouldn't get to 20% again.
Defragging is a good thing when needed.

Over the years I only defragged occasionally while the fragmentation was fortunately reasonable despite the older versions going back to the Legacy days where every maintainence task was manual. Once I noticed a level of fragmentation being seen the defrag tool in Windows was run. It was that simple.

Starting first with Vista and later 7 as well as 8 now out MS incorporated an improved automatic maintainence tool namely the Task Scheduler where Windows keeps tabs on things. The MS page for this is seen at Features of the Windows Vista hard disk defragmentation utility

With XP you could set things up to see an automatic process tend to keeping the fragmentation low or non existant while the newer versions implimented an automated process where yiou hardly see any level unless you store a large volume of files and some files by themselves become heavily fragmented.

At one time with the older version lacking these things once a drive saw a high percentage the overall system performance became sloppy! You had to get in there and run the defrag tool to get it back down again or suffer! Since Vista's time plus some other recommended 3rd party tool have been seen it's usually rare to find any drive in desperite need unless the system is totally neglected!

One of those good little freebies that actually defrags a drive at a much faster pace then the Windows defrag tool you can grab at any time is the Pinform Defraggler which is a lightweight app and goes on fast. You won't even know that one is running when you start it up. I hardly use it here however since I generally don't find much above the 0% level with two main storage drives along with two OS drives since the automatic maintainence keeps it down low.

How about that for service. robinb9, Night Hawk and myself got there almost at the same time with answers for you.
Jack if you have any more question fell free to ask.

You know it's a good thing I decided to check since I never checked the host/boot drive or second OS drive following the clean of 7 and repartitioning on the second back last June as far as using the Analyze Disk option. And what do you know despite those two drives and how much I pack onto the two storage drives as well as deleting files at times have a look.



Now that's having over 500gb of files on each of the two 1tb storage drives and still finding it at 0%. It shows the automatic maintainence is working all by itself. The 3rd party option simply ends up as an option!

That is Windows 7 built in defrag isn't it? No 3rd part program.