Twayne wrote (in
Sure it does. The more the head has to move back and forth, the
quicker the armateur will fail and the greater the chance of the head
crashing. Granted, drives today are built much better than in the
past (although even that’s debateable), but that does not change the
fact that the more that phyiscal parts move, the faster they will
fail.
Yes; the more physical parts move, the more they wear. But you are
assessing much more import to it in this instance than is reasonable;
it's a negligible fact within the forest of facts that lead up to a
drive failure.
If head movement due to defrag were the only thing involved, and
defrag was the only thing that made the heads move, your conjecture
might have something to it. But that is not the real world.
Again I recommend you do more research if this is an important issue
to you because it's negligible in the overall scheme of things. You are
producing seemingly logical proposals which could only be true in a
controlled, specific-activity session of the drives.
The number of "normal" (of which the variations are likely almost
infinite) head movements, reads and writes if much much higher than any
defrag run at even weekly or daily intervals.
The vast majority of the time, even when the machine is sitting
idle, the heads may be in service, doing some of the many background
tasks normally accomplished in any operating system. You would have to
create a very specific, controlled situation for your conjecture to
become more than negligible.
Using your logic, keeping a drive fully fragmented would result in
almost no wear of the heads because they would never have far to move
and fewer occasions to move.
The M in MTBF stands for mean, in other words, an MTBF of five years
means that /on average/, it will be five years between failures, but
it depends on usage, environment, etc. If you use the crap out of the
drive, it *is* usually going to die sooner than one that’s idling
most of the time. Of course it depends on the activity and parts
involved. For example, defragging alot would result in the heads/arms
dying quicker, but not the spindle, but powering up/down a lot
*would* cause the spindle to die because of the frequent
spin-up/down.
M stands for "Mean"; right. However, "Mean" does NOT mean "average".
Again, more research on your part would clarify this for you. And, once
more, if the ONLY thing going on was what you describe, your conjecture
might become more than moot. But again, I say, do some research on the
subject and become more informed on these things and you will understand
them better. Holding fast to one logical assumption you have made at
the expense of ignoring all others is not the way to figure these things
out. You need the forest, not just a couple of trees in the forest of
interest.
Think about your body. Doing a lot of reading would wear your eyes,
doing a lot of typing/writing would wear your arms and fingers, doing
a lot of weightlifting would wear your joints and knees; and this is
with organic systems that can repair themselves!
Nah, bad analogy and again, it ignores the many other things that have
an impact on such things. e.g. reading does NOT "wear" your eyes. Your
eyes are "seeing" 24/7, even while you're asleep, and muscle movement is
nearly constant. Eye movement is even noticeable to others during
certain stages of sleep. Analogies such as this go nowhere; stick to
facts, not intimations and analogous situations.
It’s not really simple, there are confounding factors, but yes,
generally speaking, you don’t want to over-do it with defragging; at
best it just wastes electricity and creates heat without providing
much in return (unless you’re obsessive coumpulsive and need it nice
and organized). If solid-state drives could be created with something
more resiliant and faster than flash-RAM, then drives would become
really amazing: very fast, cool, low-power, and reliable.
At best, defragging too much keeps defrag times short and there is
little to do each time defrag runs. Defragging a drive that has already
been properly defragged can literally take only a few seconds to
complete. I see it happen fairly often when I happen to defrag a drive
that hasn't become fragmented. So, even by your conjecture, there would
be little head movement beyond reading the tables to see what needs to
be fragmented.
If you're using a 3rd party defragger and it's taking a long time to
run, even on a properly already defragged drive, then I would suggest
you look into a better tool. Unfragmented data should NOT be moved;
ever, by a decent defrag program.
The ONLY drive that becomes fragmented during non-use of that drive
is the operating system drive. That's because it's reading and writing
almost constantly, usually to the registry but also in performing any of
the many background tasks that may be set to run while the machine is
idle. Other non-system drives will not fragment, so defragging one of
those only takes a couple tens or so of seconds, or should anyway.
There is nothing to do on an already defragged disk drive.
Once more, I'll say it: Do some research on the issues if this is
imortant to you. If it isn't, and you simply have a closed minded
objection to anyone having the audacity to call you wrong, well, you're
just showing your own ignorance and inability to refrain from giving
mis-information. Posting unverifiable mis-information is only slightly
better than being a 1. spammer and 2. a troll. But a person who will
check things out when they've ben advised their information might be
incorrect, well, is a thinking person interested in the accuracy of his
posts and the well being of those he advises.
Should I say it again? Do some research. I'm not providing URLs to
verifying this information for a couple of reasons: It's easy to find,
and I have a feeling even white papers would simply fly by you without
even a glance at them. You have more interest in being thought to be
right than you do in actually being accurate.
Unless you have something intelligent to say, I'll likely not be
responding further you in this thread. I've said what I need to say and
all I'd end up doing is repeating the same information again.
HTH
Twayne
