Defragment HDD

I don't think that it would but just to make sure, can defragging your hard drive on an almost daily basis damage it in any way?

 

Once a week would be less damaging to a machine with moving parts.

 

Yeah thats pretty much what I meant, guess I should tone down the hyberbole : P

 

As a rule, I defrag monthly. However, before installing any new software, I have a routine that includes defragging, setting a restore point and/or backing up my system. This keeps everything optimal and I have peace of mind in the process.

 

Will it damage the drive? Well, not really, since if you defrag daily, then at almost any given point in time, the fragmentation of your hard drive will be very low, so the defragger will probably run for just a few seconds, clean up the (few) fragmented files and then quit. Automatic defragmenters work on a similar manner: they check for fragmentation and defrag (but only if necessary) when the system is idle..usually for few minutes or less, everyday once the initial fragmentation has been taken care of. In this aspect, they are a more 'set it and forget it' efficient type of solution when compared to the older manual/scheduled way of doing it. This has benefits if you deal with many drives that see significant fragmentation often and you cannot be bothered to defrag those manually.

 

The read heads would still have to scan the entire drive, even if not re-writing everything.

That's a lot of wear and tear for what benefit?

 

I don't think that is of much concern.

Consider it similar to a daily virus scan, but much, much shorter. A defrag analysis takes what....a few tens of seconds at the max? A virus scan easily takes anything from 10 mins to a couple of hours and the HDD is constantly working all the time.

Modern HDDs are tough enough to easily withstand a few full disk scans a day....

 

And yet, hard drives are (typically) still the first item to fail in a computer system.

Sure, they can endure a few full scans, but each one is decreasing the lifespan of the unit a little more.

Efficiency is the ratio of what you put in to what you get out. You may be able to get away scanning daily, but is the time, energy, and wear and tear worth the next to no benefit you will see from doing so?

Particularly on NTFS systems, defragging is essentially useless. The read heads may have to travel less for contiguous files, but the filesystem is so efficient, there's really no performance gain.

The only question I see is whether such frequent defrags will lower the travel of the read arms enough to compensate for the wear and tear of defragging. I'd have to do extensive testing to know for sure, but I'm willing to bet that it's not. A weekly or monthly defrag schedule is much more likely to produce a benefit.

 

Apart from optical drives, HDDs are the only components that have critical moving parts, so it's quite likely that they will fail first. A defragmented drive helps to reduce the unwanted head seeks and reduce wear and tear on the actuator arm.

We have to agree to disagree here: I don't think a daily defrag analysis is any issue at all. Again, it takes a few seocnds to a minute or so at the maximum...it's really inconsequential when you look at the amount of workload on the drive daily. Heck, I'd guess that downloading a small file from teh internets works the drive more.

Again, we have to agree to disagree. You are absolutely right that NTFS is less affected by fragmentation compared to FAT, but it's not totally immune from it's effects. Defragmentation will help restore any performance loss from fragmentation especially when the drive begins to get filled up.

Defragmenting even a fresh Win XP/SP2 + MS Office + essential apps install helps, as the drive is pretty fragmented even at this point. (I recently had to reinstall XP due to a comprehensive hardware upgrade.)

Besides, it's not only performance....the chances of data recovery from a defragmented drive is much higher compared to a fragmented drive in the case of a HDD crash.

Everything would depend on the individual user's activities and the levels of fragmentation....if the PC is used merely for email and basic web browsing, then less frequent defrags will suffice. More frequently for gamers and other users who see a lot fo file modification activity.

 

LOL
I think you and I are saying the same thing in two different ways.

We agree that you want to reduce the wear on the actuator arm. My question is, how is it the scanning and NOT defragging is going to IMPROVE your disc's lifespan?

hehehe... I'm glad you bring this up. Despite my feelings on defragging, every time I build a new workstation for one of my users, I do a defrag, because yes, you do see a high level of fragmentation after even just an install of these few critical things.

Do I see a performance difference on any one of these machines?

Nope. None. Not one lick.

Now THIS is an interesting point that I hadn't considered.
This would make it all worthwhile for someone who didn't have a proper backup.
I'll have to investigate this. I haven't had a failed drive recently that I couldn't recover data from, despite lack of defragmentation. I'm cloning these drives, but I assume you mean something more like an 'un-delete' utility???

At any rate, you'll have to compromise between wear and tear caused by too much fragmentation and wear and tear caused by too much defragging. I don't think defragging daily is that sweet spot by any stretch.

 

Er.. I never said that scanning is going to improve anything!!

As I recall, it was you who said that a simple scan for a defrag analysis will introduce unnecessary wear and tear to the drive, which IMHO is quite immaterial in the larger scheme of things

Well, my experience is definitely different. Also, my PC is on 24x7 and it's my primary entertainment/gaming/work machine for most of the time, so it sees a lot of action...especially *cough* BT *cough*.

Try playing Oblivion or GoW on a badly fragmented drive and see how 'smooth' (hehe) the gameplay is, as it loads levels/textures/areas on-the-fly from the disk.

Anyway, let us disagree on this point; I am not arguing this any further.

From what I know, it is easier to recover the data from a corrupt/damaged/crashed HDD if it is contiguous so you dont have to search all over the platter for bits and pieces of the file. To be honest, I have not verified this personally. Because I haven't had a HDD crash on me in a while, from which I needed to recover data, and I hope it stays that way

Defragging daily is probably not required, but contrary to popular belief, it's not going to damage anything, because, as i said before, if there is nothing to defrag, then well...there is nothing to defrag and the drive has no work to do in this department. So, essentially, the "daily defrag" is basically a <1 min thing.