does Defrag. affects HardDrive?

[worldpease]

Hey, does the defragmentation proces afect the HardDrive?,
even in long term?
I just heard that, but I don´t believe it.
Is it true or not?

[S!X]

Not that i know of, it helps it!:unsure:

[Storm]

it rearanges the data on your HDD, so yes, it effect it, but not more than normal reading/writing..........

and physically your hard drive doesnt gain anything from it (except that you'll be stressing it less since your OS has easier access to it)

[Money Fist]

yea but as it rearragnes files isnt that stressing the hard drive?
my computer always need a good 10hour defrag session
and man it gets VERY hot

[lynx]

I defrag every night, it stops all those long defrag sessions. If your disk is getting very hot you should have a disk cooler.

I also use Diskeeper Pro, rather than the crappy offerings from Microsoft and Symantec.

[worldpease]

Yea, I defrag. like every two weeks,
and it only takes an hour at most.

[tesco]

ya if you defrag often it could actually be helping the drive because it will have an easier time reading the files.

The more often you do it, the less time it takes to defrag as well.

[peat moss]

ya if you defrag often it could actually be helping the drive because it will have an easier time reading the files.

The more often you do it, the less time it takes to defrag as well.


Yep ,I have my Diskeeper on screen saver mode . It defrags while I'm away from my computer. @ Fiber If your computer takes 10 hours, a program like Diskeeper would help. Takes me less than 20 seconds.


Link: http://filesharingtalk.com/vb3/showthread.php?t=82741

[KhalidB]

You shouldn't need to defrag a lot but you can also reduce fragmentation other ways:

Create a seperate partition for swap and the temp folder
Get disk partitioning software (you know where to get this)
Move the swap file before moving the temp folder
Set the swap file to a fixed size

Dont use a browser cache
Are they really necessary any more?
In IE set it to as low as possible
In Mozilla set the size to 0kb

In Bittorrent allocate and zero on creation
As soon as you start a DL it created the file and puts zeroes in it
This reduces fragmentation
Azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net) can do this. So can many other BT clients
Defrag before you start a big download

I do all of the above. The only things on my system which really end up fragmented are log files which are a couple of kilobytes. These aren't exactly thrashing the disk. You probably know all this anyway but there are people who don't.

[erRor67]

I use Perfect Disk and defrag once a month. Acutally, I defraged yesterday. And I heard that defraging actually lowers the life of the harddrive as its doing mass reorganization.

[lynx]

You shouldn't need to defrag a lot but you can also reduce fragmentation other ways:

Create a seperate partition for swap and the temp folder
Get disk partitioning software (you know where to get this)
Move the swap file before moving the temp folder
Set the swap file to a fixed size

Dont use a browser cache
Are they really necessary any more?
In IE set it to as low as possible
In Mozilla set the size to 0kb

In Bittorrent allocate and zero on creation
As soon as you start a DL it created the file and puts zeroes in it
This reduces fragmentation
Azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net) can do this. So can many other BT clients
Defrag before you start a big download

I do all of the above. The only things on my system which really end up fragmented are log files which are a couple of kilobytes. These aren't exactly thrashing the disk. You probably know all this anyway but there are people who don't.Really can't agree with you on the browser cache, that's just wasteful of bandwidth both for you and the sites you visit. If I wanted slow browsing I wouldn't have bothered getting broadband.

I use Perfect Disk and defrag once a month. Acutally, I defraged yesterday. And I heard that defraging actually lowers the life of the harddrive as its doing mass reorganization.It is unlikely to reduce disk life unless it has to do so much work that your drive overheats. As I said above, I defrag nightly, it normally only takes a few seconds. I also allow about an hour between defragging each partition so the disk has time to cool down if it has got more fragmented than usual.

[orcutt989]

Is that true? Does defragging lower the life of your HDD? That doesnt make much sense to me.

[tesco]

Is that true? Does defragging lower the life of your HDD? That doesnt make much sense to me.
read lynx's psot above yours.

[worldpease]

Yea, I wasn´t completly shure about fragmented log files, but I always tough that too.
-And about defragmenting before any big download, something I´ve always wonder,
does defragmenting in the midle of a big download (say a TV Season) afects the file, does it make it corrupt? or on the contrary, could the download obstruc the defragmentation proces?

[lynx]

Yea, I wasn´t completly shure about fragmented log files, but I always tough that too.
-And about defragmenting before any big download, something I´ve always wonder,
does defragmenting in the midle of a big download (say a TV Season) afects the file, does it make it corrupt? or on the contrary, could the download obstruc the defragmentation proces?Defragging should not affect any current operation, except possibly slowing things down. If you get corruption because of drfragging, ditch that defrag program - it is faulty.

Similarly the download can't obstruct the defrag process, the rate at which you can download is far slower than the rate at which your disk will be defragged, so although it may degrade the performance of the defragger slightly it can never beat it. In any case there will always be files which can't be defragged, if necessary a poor defrag program will simply mark active files in this way and leave them alone.