Hard Drive defraging

[TGMcCallie]

A supose to be technicion told me that the worse thing you could do to your hard drive was to defrag it. He said it would decrease it life span.

I think he is wrong. Is he correct or am I?

Thanks

Tom

 

[JackNaylorPE]

He's a bonehead (kidding) .... no one is ever wrong ....he has just been misinformed

on SSD's it can be a concern.

 

[TGMcCallie]

That's exactly what I thought. Windows would not put a degfrag program in their software if it hurt your system. I thought it was good for the speed.

 

[buzznut]

Yes, regular defrags are good for your hard drive, and good for continual system performance.

That's like saying, "Don't ever use your hard drive, it will decrease it's lifespan. Just leave it alone."

 

[TGMcCallie]

I thought the guy was full of himself. I knew he was wrong but just wanted to reassure my asumption.

Thanks for everyone's advice

 

[sidewinderdt]

Defragging will not reduce a HDD's lifespan; in fact, if anything, it should improve it a bit because, over the long term, the actuator arm will be doing relatively less work reading an un-fragmented file.
Check out #4 in the hard drive myths
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=84&pgno=1

These days, some of the more advanced commercial defraggers are actually fully automatic, and have built-in fragmentation prevention features, so even less defragging is required in the long run.

 

[TGMcCallie]

Exactly as I thought. Thanks for the additional information concerning myths.

 

[blackhawk1928]

Easiest way to make your hard drive live long and need to defragment very rarley is increase file system cluster size. That way there is increased performance, much less fragmentation, and almost no need to defragment

 

[TGMcCallie]

Easiest way to make your hard drive live long and need to defragment very rarley is increase file system cluster size. That way there is increased performance, much less fragmentation, and almost no need to defragment

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Just how do you do that?

 

[blackhawk1928]

Third party utilities like easeus partition mananger and active partition mananger can do this You format the drive into 64KB clusters NTFS, then install windows into existing partition.

 

[fusiondataservices]

Increasing the file cluster size has caused file transfers and things of that nature to go a lot slower on the computers where I have done that.

 

[blackhawk1928]

I dont about you but its faster...the only downside of increasing cluster size is a bit less space available but performance is better, less fragmentation...etc