Defragmenting your Hard Drive(s)

[ripken204]

You can never hurt your hard drive by defragging, you can never defrag to much. I have never read any where that defragging can damage your hard drive.

I use a simple VBS script to defrag my drives. Here a script that runs clean manager then defrag all the local drives.

i dont think its all true. i just defragged my c: drive for the 1st time since ive installed windows 2 months ago. it took about 20 sec to defrag...

You're right ripken, it's not true at all. As I'm sure you know, defragmenting causes excessive disk usage by moving files to reorder them to eliminate free space gaps between files. If you do this every day, that's far more wear and tear on your computer's hard drive.

Defragmenting once every month or two I can see being feasible. Daily is far too excessive and will cause more problems than what it's worth.

I'm really surprised that people don't realize that defragging frequently (even daily) does more harm than good.

tarun is right here. defragging does hurt ur hdd, thats why i dont do it much. havnt u guys heard the sounds your hdd makes when its defragging? doing that everyday definetly hurts the drive.

[DigeratiPrime]

I've bumped up the cluster sizes on my drives from the default 4kb to 8kb, 16kb, and 64kb. The drives rarely get fragmented now.

[gunsmokingman]

Sorry to burst your bubble but defragging does not hurt your hard drive. As I said I have not seen and read

any where any thing that would back up your claims. If it was as bad as you said, why would Diskkeeper have the option set it and forget it, or why would would Microsoft now have a automatic defrag run on Vista.

I even went and Google Defrag and from what I read there was never any mention of damage to the hard drive.

[ripken204]

ive heard many people say that it does

[Shindo_Hikaru]

Here is one article about extending the life of your hard drive

http://www.thetechzone.com/?m=show&id=500&page=1

[Tarun]

A Case In Point

Disk fragmentation is a common problem for users of Outlook Express and database software. Each time outlook saves new mail, it does so in a different physical location from the previous time. This results in extreme fragmentation, causing longer hard drive access times and forcing more strain on the heads. This strain can eventually lead to a head crash, and often that means a virtually unrecoverable drive. Finally, in the event of a total crash, a fragmented drive is much more difficult to recover then a healthy defragged drive.

At 7200 RPM for most standard hard drives they don't really have "larger seek times".

[prx984]

a fragmented drive is much more difficult to recover then a healthy defragged drive

just wanna ask a question on that, would a healthy drive just crash all of a sudden? if so, what could be a main cause of this? sudden electric overload, maybe a power failure when shutting the drive down?

[Tarun]

ive heard many people say that it does

As have I. I'm going to research this more.

[prx984]

iv never had a hard drive fail on me. not for anything. i defrag a lot, most times daily. my dad has a 1.2gb hard drive that he bought back in 1997, and he used that computer a lot and defragged a lot, everyday. the drive is still going strong. i really dont beleive that defragging will damage the drive.

the worse thing i have had happen with a drive wasnt even my fault, the owner of another computer killed a drive and i have it now (but it still works as storage)

other people may have different cases though. iv never had a hard drive fail on me though.

Edited July 29, 2006 by Cygnus

[taj]

I use Diskeeper 10, and it only takes a minute or two at maximum to defragment a 250 GB HDD, that's in Set it & Forget It mode. It does sound like the HDD is being 'thrashed' while Diskeeper does it's job, and I do notice an increase of a few degrees in the HDD's temperature. However, I have never heard that defragmenting your HDD is actually 'bad' for your HDD, in that it can reduce it's life time. I was just wondering if defragmenting your HDD is bad, then what about creating and restoring hard disk images?

- Taj

[H4CK]

Yeah, there you go now! Enjoi!

[REMOVED]

[LLXX]

I was just wondering if defragmenting your HDD is bad, then what about creating and restoring hard disk images?

It's the "random" seeks that cause the most wear on the actuator arm bearings. If you defrag frequently, there will be much less fragmentation and thus not many clusters will have to be moved around.

Most imaging software do linear reads/writes, i.e. starting from the very first sector and continuing on to the last. In this way the motion of the actuator is slow and constant, so there is little wear.

As well I'd like to mention that FAT32 seems to cause less seek activity than an NTFS filesystem. as tested with a new installation of WinXP twice, once on FAT32 formatted disk and then again with NTFS.

[taj]

Thanks for the insight, LLXX, much appreciated! So if you defrag often, the HDD will need to write less each time you defrag afterwards? I'm also quite surprised to hear that FAT32 causes less seek activity than NTFS... what size HDD did you use to test this out? I thought FAT32 was recommended for HDDs less than 32 GB - http://www.theeldergeek.com/ntfs_or_fat32_file_system.htm

- Taj

Edited July 31, 2006 by taj

[LLXX]

It was a 120Gb WD1200JB.

The obvious answer to why NTFS produces more disk activity is that it is a considerably more complicated filesystem than FAT32. More information is kept about each file, and it is also 'journaling' - for each write to a file, an additional one is made to the log.

[Orange™]

I defrag once a week and that works best for me