Computer newbies forum: Too much defraging could be bad?

You've got me thinking now. I defrag every Saturday morning, takes about 30 Mins, should I be doing it less? The thing is, it does seem to help, and I'm not a 'hardened' user like some of the people are on this forum. I might try leaving it for a month, see how the PC responds, but then it might take ages to defrag, Hmmm, what to do?

you may want to mess around with your hard drive partitioning instead, then you won't need to defragment, higher cluster sizes would also help.

I have seen a number of HD errors on systems that do not defrag at least periodically. IMO you should defrag before any new program installation, also if you have a newer drive I have seen less harm in fragmenting on a semi regular basis. It is true that if your drive is fragmented then you are causing a little extra work for the drive. Then again if nothing happens to change your HD's then you could be safe and only defrag 1 time a month, Also don't buy a cheap drive.;). Just my humble opinion though. Except that you really do need to defrag before and sometimes after software installs, or large file transfers. HD's are such low cost items that to be safe you can always set up a couple of drives in a RAID configuration. If one fails, get new one and you have a up to date back up as well.

I have 10 partitions of various sizes totaling 200GB and have Norton System Doctor monitoring them 24/7, as soon as the fragmentation level reaches 50% on one of the partitions it lets me know and I defrag it. This means that some of the lesser used partitions, such as the backup partition, may not be defragged for several months. This seems to work well for me and my system always runs smoothly and quickly. Does anyone have any thoughts on the method I use?

I have two hard drives in my PC. The one I use for backup I rarely defrag - I occasionally delete the files and do a new complete backup. I don't backup things that can be replaced from CD, but I do backup downloaded items and backup my email and bookmarks. I'm thinking now that three hard drives would be even better. One for the operating system and major or tried-and-true applications. One for Documents & trying out downloadable programs. And one for backing up the second one (also burn backups occasionally). Is there any advantage to having one humongous, partitioned disk, as opposed to several smaller disks? Seems like the separate disks would be easier and safer. hmmm, now I'm thinking a fourth to clone the bootable primary disk.

Hi
I don't know who had this idea, but when you use your pc, the hard drive might start out nice, but as you use any programme, it breaks into bits scattered all over the hard drive (fragmenting) basically when you defrag the machine, it puts all these bits back together again, and you'll see a big speed increase as well cos the pc is not having to look all over the place for data. Another reason to defrag regularly is that those small bits can easily get corrupted, defrag about once a week, and you should be ok, I've never heard of anyone having the drive wear out because of this!

I have been using computers for 13 years & I used to defrag at least twice a month. I don't believe you can do any damage to your hard drive but I will make 2 points. I have used Norton Utilities since it was a dos version. While defragging does put your files back together, I have never noticed any appreciable gain in speed; although it probably does speed it up where you can see it in tests, for the real world user you will not notice it. Therefore, the main reason people do it is moot.

A second and I believe a more important point is no matter which program you would use to defrag, they are all doing the same thing. They are moving your data to different places on your hard drive. Although this has not happened to me, there is a chance while moving your data, a file could be corrupted causing you to lose data or even a program not to work. This is enough reason for me to quit defragging on any regular basis. I now will only defrag twice a year & don't even know if I will do that.

If I were a newbie (that was two decades ago), I would worry about spyware, malware, and/or virues corrupting my system than being concerned about defragging my hdrive.

There are only two parts of the drive where 'wear-n-tear' are relevant: the head actuating unit and the bearings that carry the platters. These components are designed to operate for tens-of-thousands of hours between failures. The heads on ANY modern hdrive NEVER touch the media, execpt in the event of a crash, ie. a catastrophic physical failure.

Now, the head actuator and primary drive motor bearings involve hi-speed, permanent metal-to-metal contact, resulting in some amount of friction. Friction is the principal enemy of all things mechanical.

I've developed low-level OS and driver code in a previous incarnation and have NEVER seen anything in my hands-on experience nor read anything credible that would suggest that defragging is harmful or helpful to the hardware or the drive's contents. Defragging only makes the OS work more efficiently. However, drives are SO much faster than they were ten to fifteen years ago that defragging is less important to MOST (not all) users. Oh yes, drives are ENORMOUS as compared to drives from ten years ago. Consequently, there's a lot of contiguous space on most users' drives that never gets used.

This is not to say that a particular drive model or products from a particular drive mfr will live up to their warranties/specs. However, *IF* the drive lives up to its specs, then value of defragging really depends on HOW an indivdual uses his/her computer. So that as always, YMMV....

When I was learning to drive, my dad taught me to pump my brakes. Said it would reduce the wear on the brake pads.
Today I lease one car and own another. I guess if pumping saves me one brake pad every 100K miles, it is worth it.
The point is that there is another reason to pump your brakes, especially in incliment weather, to maintain control of the car.
Defraging a drive may not offer a noticable the performance increase for most of us regular users... It may increase the wear on a drive, but for laptop users, especially those that travel, defrag offeres an additional benefit of security.
When a file is deleted, often it is the pointer or reference to the file that is removed, not the file itself. If you delete a sensitive document, clear it out of the recycle bin, it could still be recovered by a savvy criminal.
By regularly defragging, you destroy the actual deleted file.

I defrag primarily for boot speed. To that end I use BootVis on one puter and System Mechanic on another to Defrag the Registry every time I add a program or change my start programs. Then I defrag the whole drive for optimization. That puts me in the "several times a week category".

Funny question....Yes, and my wife believes that every time she stops for gas that putting only ten dollars in at a time saves money.....
Defrag organizes files. If your drive has less chatter time looking, then you would think it would be more productive with a shorter seek time and therefore less wear.

Defragging does not wear out your hard drive - in fact it EXTENDS the life of your drive and your computer for 2-3 years on the average. Using Diskeeper's "Set It and Forget It" features lets me go about my business and never have to worry about defrag. It automatically determines how frequently defrag is needed and runs in the background. What more could you ask for! Plus it handles extremely large drives. I've read lots of places that lack of defrag causes crashes and reliability issues. This is even posted in Microsoft's knowledge base.

Let's get real. A hard drive is warranteed for 3-5 years (as stated above). How many of us will not upgrade our systems/hard drives in that time frame? You can't wear it out in just 3 to 5 years if you defrag every day.

Let me first preface my comment by stating that I am a Product Manager/Engineer for a major disk defragmentation vendor.

Simply put, defragmenting does not wear out a hard drive. Here's a simplified example: accessing a file in 1000 pieces once a day for a calendar year totals 365,000 disk I/O's! Compare that to a one time defrag (1000 disk I/O's one time) and then 365 more (1 for each day the rest of the year) for a total of 1365. An exponential difference.

Borrowing from another comment in this thread; disk life is measured by MTBF (mean time between failure) which is basically a measure of disk activity. The less activity wasted on file fragmentation, the longer your drive will be around to do useful things.

As for safety of defrag, that is left to the operating system to manage, not the defragmenter. It is designed to ensure defrag is 100% safe.

I would only add w/ the following: There are WAY too many so-called PC techs (pros and amateurs) who really know NOTHING about HOW software like OSes work that spread the drivel that started this thread. ( You probably know the diff bet a fopen()/open(), write()/fwrite(), etc. ) Mind you, I'm not suggesting that defragging is unnecessary, just not as important as some know-it-alls suggest.