I use the 2007 revision. Do you notice ANY difference with the newer version? The sales pitch to upgrade left me cold.

Hi Marc,
Nothing earth shattering. I still use 2007 on my test box. I believe it works just as well as 2008 does.

Sounds about right to me. When a drive is fragmented, it has to work harder to gather all the bits of information of a file, putting more wear and tear on the drive.

I’m using Diskeeper ‘08 and I didn’t really see a performance difference after running it the first time, despite not having defragged in two months after installing a fresh copy of XP Pro.

Nonetheless, I still use it regularly ‘just in case’ it actually makes a difference.

I never defrag a drive and have only had really old 4 and 2GB hard drives die. I have only defraged my moms old pc’s hdd and that the only one i can remember doing.

When a drive is fraggmented it needs to move more to access the fraggmented data, So yes keeping your drive defragged will make it last longer.

Well, I have a hard time believing that. The amount of head movement hat you put out for ONE Defragmentation session will be more than normal wear and tare of more than one moth normal use. Yes, I you use your hard drive fragmented - the voice coils - have to travel a lot to gather the data that you are requesting. But defrag will not ‘extend’ the life of your drive - in fact it shortens it as well, hence the warning that we should not defrag our drive to often.

This seems like it could be true. If you think about it when you defrag the system you are moving the files to the outer edge of the drive and writing the files on the drive associated with a program together. Thus you in turn are making the motor that moves the nettle work less. In turn improving the life of your hdd!

The source referenced isn’t particularly robust. I would counter both that article and your reference of it with an alternative approach.

My title would be: Defragmenting HDA’s can lead to longer operational disk life.

Why? S.M.A.R.T. disk subsystem hides disk errors from the OS, the application layer, and the system user. As data zones on the disk become less reliable, S.M.A.R.T needs to be “shown” that a area is in need of help BEFORE it can help it. The way it helps it is to relocate the data in the less reliable zone to a new one, retiring the old zone, making the overall disk more reliable again.

Why is defrag beneficial? The work of surface scanning and checking all files on a drive is an excellent way to give S.M.A.R.T an opportunity to discover that an area of the disk drive is in need of help.

Apart from any performance gains that MAY BE had from regular defragmentation, it’s the reliability aspects that can be universally beneficial.

What other operations can exercise the disks S.M.A.R.T. system in this way?
- formating and reloading OS and software
- SpinRite http://preview.tinyurl.com/8p4ex

I agree that the source is partially effective at making a case FOR regular defragmentation. This is not normal practice in most organizations or homes. I agree that regular disk maintenance is needed unless systems are formatted and have software reloaded regularly before the midpoint of the HDA’s mean time between failure rating.

Well logic goes that the more fragmented your drive is the more work the drive must accomplish to retrieve or write data, thus aging the drive faster. Being mechanical the hard drive will fail faster the more it is used and thus die faster.

Defragging could increase hard drive life by requiring less work on the hard drives part. When a hard disk becomes fragmented it has to work harder at finding all the pieces of a particular file…right? Therefore if the files are contiguous the hard drive runs less putting less wear on it’s associated parts and extending it’s life.

Well OBVIOUSLY a fragmented disk decreases dark drive life, there is more movement thus stress on the mechanical componts from more thrashing caused by reading bits of random files all around.

Anyone who doesn’t use UltimateDefrag just don’t know defraggers….. best and most usefull doze app along with CCleaner. Mind you I don’t use windoze anymore, but when I did use doze, UltimateDefrag was my tested tried and true gold medalist.

You know, it seems illogical to think that the defragging would increase life because, to defrag you have to spin the disc. But… If you think about it, not defragging means the computer has to spin the disc more in the process of finding stuff. I’ll bet you someone is going to try this and see if anything happens.

Thanks for all of the comments everyone. I think I’ll continue to defrag just in case it does extend HD life. No harm, no foul.

I appreciate all of you sharing your thoughts.

Regards, Ron

Caution: long post ahead. I had a few minutes to spare lol..

@helpmetechshow, IIRC, the greatest stress on the hard drive platter/spindle is not when it is spinning at a constant velocity but when it has to accelerate or deccelerate i.e. spin up or down during bootup and shut down. When the drive is up and running, the platters always spin at a constant velocity regardless of whether there is any disk I/O, defrag does nothing extraordinary to the spinning platters, so I don’t think your argument is logical.

As for the actuator arm assembly, yes, it has more work to do, if the files are fragmented requiring seeking all over the drive (depending on the locations of the fragmented files and free space), especially in case of sequential read/write I/O. Also, most good defragmenters consolidate free space to an extent, so the defragmented files are packed closer to each other, reducing unnecessary arm movements even further . Especially for lower capacity drives with low areal bit densities.

True, drive operations are not always (or even often) sequential even for perfectly defragmented files; there is often some random access going on by windows and other apps, but on the whole a defragmented drive is definitely in better health than a fragmented one.

As for the argument that the defragmentation operation itself causes unnecessary arm movements, it’s irrelevant when you consider the number of wasted seeks when that same fragmented file is accessed over it’s lifetime several hundred times. The actuator arm ‘wear’ during defragmentation is easily recovered many times over, in the long run. But this are all academic arguments anyway.

Does defragmentation help in performance? YMMV for sure, but in my case, it absolutely does. I have 4 drives - an equal mix of 500 and 250GB drives- in my gaming/photoediting XP Pro rig. It experiences a lot of file modification and creation activity, daily, since it’s my main entertainment center too. Without defragging, the RAW and TIFF thumbnails take ages to load, and the whole system begins to feel less responsive. It’s very real and noticeable, and not just a placebo effect lol. That said, I can’t be bothered to manually defrag these drives regularly….so I have stuck a third party auto defragmenter on it. Makes my life much easier.

BTW, the vista defragger is a completely new from-the-scratch effort by Microsoft. They obviously thought defragging was still important enough to warrant reworking a feature completely