To Defrag or Not To Defrag?

[retfarcratS]

Good Morning all,

Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away....I used to be a Mac-man. Loved them. Anyhow, a friend once told me that defragging a drive with regularity is not a good thing.

I believed him/her, and continue to tell others the same.

So...I now ask y'all...

Does defragging your drive with regularity lead to more defragmentation?

Humbly,
refarcratS

[FrameWork]

It's always a good idea to defrag at least twice a month. If you don't defrag with some regularity, you will experience a slowdown in your system performance.

[nebulus200]

Good Morning all,

Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away....I used to be a Mac-man. Loved them. Anyhow, a friend once told me that defragging a drive with regularity is not a good thing.

I believed him/her, and continue to tell others the same.

So...I now ask y'all...

Does defragging your drive with regularity lead to more defragmentation?

Humbly,
refarcratS

It generally is a good idea to defragment the file system from time to time. In the old days it could be very critical to getting good performance out of a system; however, these days, systems come with so much memory and are so much faster, unless you are doing just an enormous amount of disk I/O, I wouldn't consider it nearly as important as it used to be. For getting a small increase of performance on an older PC, maybe, but for anyting newer, it is pretty much overkill (margin of performance increases is very small).

You can usually tell whether a drive really needs defragging just by carefully listening to it read/write from the disk. If it is reading a file and you hear alot of pauses (they can be very short ones, maybe even sounding like alot of really fast clicks) then you probably have a good amount of fragmentation and would benefit from running it; however, if on disk I/O you hear a steady grinding sound, you probably won't benefit from it much... If you were wondering, the pauses are because the head is having to seek to a different part of the disk to continue reading the file (defragging puts all of the file in contiguous (side-by-side) blocks, which eliminates the need for the head to seek out different sectors.

/nebulus

[retfarcratS]

Thank You very much.

BTW I seared my ear trying to listen to my drives just now.

[d00dz Attackin]

Thankyou nebulus200 I didn't know that, I would defrag every week or sometimes 2 times a week.
I like a clean computer .

Cya ~dzA~

[nebulus200]

Heh, you don't have to take the case off or anything (or at least I never have)...you should be able to hear the drive spin and click with it fully put together...dunno, maybe I just have been doing this so long I understand the hdd's language *yikes*

/nebulus

[Sadpterpan]

ok well then go tell your friend to NEVER defrag his drive and ask him if its a good idea in 3 months.... heh