Frequent Defrags and Hard Drive Longevity?

[Mike Henley]

OK, here's a question; one opinion might be that frequent defrags
would prolong the life of a hard drive because it'll keep it in
healthy condition so that it'll need to do less work to get its work
done (argh, i don't know how to phrase it but I'll assume you get the
idea), the other is that it reduces the hard drive life because defrag
itself is a very taxing exercise on the hard drive.

So, before someone say "it depends(TM)", well, what would it be for a
heavily used drive, and what would it be for a normally or lightly
used one?

All I can say is that the defragger seems to be flying (very fast) on
the well-defragged drive/partitions (lightly used since previous
defrag) and crawling on the fragmented (heavily used since previous
defrag)... and it seems that the more I defrag the less time it takes
overall for it to complete a defrag job.

Is there any harm in defragging a drive/partition that doesn't need a
defrag?

 

[Jim]

-----Original Message-----
OK, here's a question; one opinion might be that frequent defrags
would prolong the life of a hard drive because it'll keep it in
healthy condition so that it'll need to do less work to get its work
done (argh, i don't know how to phrase it but I'll assume you get the
idea), the other is that it reduces the hard drive life because defrag
itself is a very taxing exercise on the hard drive.

So, before someone say "it depends(TM)", well, what would it be for a
heavily used drive, and what would it be for a normally or lightly
used one?

All I can say is that the defragger seems to be flying (very fast) on
the well-defragged drive/partitions (lightly used since previous
defrag) and crawling on the fragmented (heavily used since previous
defrag)... and it seems that the more I defrag the less time it takes
overall for it to complete a defrag job.

Is there any harm in defragging a drive/partition that doesn't need a
defrag?
.
The happy middle point is best for hard drives. So run

the defragmentor only when it looks moderately or more
fragmented, specifically greater than about 1.01 average
fragments per file. And first run your disk cleanup tool
to remove all the unneeded temp files.