defragmenting

[bagavan]

I regularly defragment my HDD once in a month or once in 15 days.does frequent defragmenting cause any damage to HDD??

 

[zigzag3143]

I regularly defragment my HDD once in a month or once in 15 days.does frequent defragmenting cause any damage to HDD??

Is it a SSD, or regular mechanical HD? You should only defrag when your % of fragmented files starts climbing over 10%. Unless you are adding and removing a ton of files on an OS HD you are doing it too often.



ken

 

[bagavan]

It is a normal HDD..Report says 9% fragmented..I wanted to know does frequent defragmenting cause damage?

 

[Bill2]

No, it doesnt.

Myth No. 4: You can wear out your hard drive if you defragment too often.

Not true. The truth is, your drive is going to work much harder if you never defrag at all! It is a common misconception that defragmentation is stressful to disk drives. In reality, fragmentation results in many more disk accesses.

Here is an example: If you have a file that is fragmented into 50 pieces, and you access it twice a day for a week, that's a total of 700 disk accesses (50 x 2 x 7). Defragmenting the file may cost 100 disk accesses (50 reads + 50 writes), but thereafter only one disk access will be required to use the file. That's 14 disk accesses over the course of a week (2 x 7), plus 100 for the defragmentation process = 114 total. 700 accesses for the fragmented computer versus 114 for the defragmented computer - the benefits are obvious.

source: http://www.diskeeper.com/diskeeper/myths/hard-drive-wear.aspx

 

[bagavan]

should I defragment only the system drive or other drives as well?

 

[Bill2]

Defragmenting the system drive means access to the OS files and program files is the fastest possible, as it should be. Personally, I never defrag data drives, since data needs to be accessed only occasionally.

 

[bagavan]

what about an ssd?will it damage?

 

[Dwarf]

It is not recommended to defrag an SSD drive. Each cell is a row/column intersection, and is addressable as such, with negligible difference in access time between different locations on the drive (typically <0.05msec for the whole drive). A HDD is different, and defragging this will boost its performance by moving data around so that it is located in successive sectors so that it can be read in one go without having to wait for the platters to spin round so that the sector containg the next block of data can be read.

 

[Bill2]

SSDs dont need to be defragged.

The main reasons for defragging your disk is to reduce seek times and to place the majority of your data particularly the OS and program files on the outer edge of the disk where read and write speeds are faster on a mechanical drive.

SSDs make nonsense of both these factors. For one their seek times are virtually nil. And secondly, there are no faster/ slower regions on the disk because there is no mechanical limiting factor. Defrag will actually decrease the life expectancy of a SSD because there are only so many writes per cell before failure.

 

[pacinitaly]

No, it doesnt.

Myth No. 4: You can wear out your hard drive if you defragment too often.

Not true. The truth is, your drive is going to work much harder if you never defrag at all! It is a common misconception that defragmentation is stressful to disk drives. In reality, fragmentation results in many more disk accesses.

Here is an example: If you have a file that is fragmented into 50 pieces, and you access it twice a day for a week, that's a total of 700 disk accesses (50 x 2 x 7). Defragmenting the file may cost 100 disk accesses (50 reads + 50 writes), but thereafter only one disk access will be required to use the file. That's 14 disk accesses over the course of a week (2 x 7), plus 100 for the defragmentation process = 114 total. 700 accesses for the fragmented computer versus 114 for the defragmented computer - the benefits are obvious.

source: Myth: Frequent Defrag Will Wear Out Your Hard Drive

Excellent!

 

[Mike8]

My view is when you defrag, if its done in minutes then you are doing it too often!, if it takes several hours then you are not doing it often enough.

 

[logicearth]

Just to add, defragging an SDD drive can in fact damange it. FYI.

 

[Petey7]

Defragmenting does put extra stress on your drive for a short amount of time. But as Bills link explains, this nothing compared to the extra stress of having to find files on a fragmented hard drive.

 

[pacinitaly]

My view is when you defrag, if its done in minutes then you are doing it too often!, if it takes several hours then you are not doing it often enough.

so the length of time is?...............

 

[Petey7]

pacinitaly, its all up to you. The best thing to do is go by percentage. If its less than 5% fragmented, don't bother. 5-15%, it's up to you. more than 15%, you need to go ahead and do it. But those are just the numbers I go by. Different people will have different preferences. Those numbers should just give you something to go on.

 

[DeaconFrost]

Aren't we all running Windows 7? Who manually defrags anymore? Honestly, I do it once after a fresh install, once I load up all my apps, and that's about it. The defragger runs automatically and keeps the drive nice and tidy for you. However, with regular use on a system that might be powered off at night, not running the auto-defrag, you still shouldn't be seeing much at all. Gone are the days of needed to manually defrag. As it is said many many times...Windows 7 is not XP.

My advice? Defrag once, and then let the system handle it. Maybe every 3 months or so I'll give it a check to see if there's any issues, but that's it. Welcome to the world of self-maintaining and self-tuning OSes.