Should I Defrag? Do you?

[psd99]

does anyone defrag their harddrives? after how long do u do this!?

Well my problem has occured again its been around 6 months since ive had my seagate barracudas! the supposedly 'SUPER QUIET' Harddrives!!! what a joke

my ones are loud like a whining sound ive tried western digital, maxtor, and now seagate and i can confirm that every harddrive ive brogght from all these companies seems to get LOUDER AND LOUDER after time! the sound is like a whining sound and today ive noticed it signiicantly!

some of you may remember my companing abt this be4. it seems whenver i buy a new harddrive it is super quiet and then around 6/8 months later the harddrive gets loud. this is coming from a pc that is on 24/7 when i mean 24/7 i mean this. could this be detrimental? i never defrag my harddrives i think its dangerous. does anyone think defraging will REDUCE the noise?


lots of my friends have got western digital and maxtor and yet they never seem to have any problems with this noise issue. its so anooying ive got quite cpu fan a quiet psu and these harddries meant to be quiet are so very loud!

its definetly the harddrives, when i but the computer to standby there annoying noise will go way.

i dont hear any abnormal CLICKS (touch wood) its just a constant sound that annoys me.
anyone have any theories as to why my harddrives always appear to get loud and annoying?

 

[Quadophile]

I defrag my computers almost every week! It takes hardly any time since most of it is not fragmented. If I do not defrag it for a month the time to defrag increases something like 4-8 times. Eventually your entire data is fragmented and your system gets slower and slower.

If you do not defrag your hard drive the head goes beserk trying to find a 20 kb file scattered in bits at twenty different locations. Your hard drive is working 20 times harder that way just trying to load that file if you do not defrag regularly.

I am afraid your problem is NOT DEFRAGGING it when you SHOULD on a regular basis. Its the wear and tear that you are now confronted with.

 

[Me__2001]

i usually analyse the HD every 2 weeks and if it is about 10% fragmented i defrag, never did it on my old 98 pc but ended up having to format it twice so its a good idea to check every so often to make sure its not to bad

 

[psd99]

okay so i aint defragged for like 8 months!

any point of doing it now? how long will it take
im looking at over 400,000 files and close to 300GB!!!!


!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[floppybootstomp]

Should I defrag? Yes. Do you? Yes.

I use Diskeeper, Version 9 is out now but I still use Version 7.

Windows' own defrag utility is also quite OK.

I defrag at least once a week, usually every day.

It sorts file positioning out and helps things run a lot sweeter. It is far from dangerous, in fact the opposite rings true, it's probably dangerous not to defrag.

Just why do you think it's dangerous?

As for whether it causes a noise from your hard drives or not - I doubt it. I've used just about every make of hard drive and some are quieter than others. Most new generation drives run pretty quiet, both my WD & especially my new Maxtor drives run almost silently.

The only time I've noticed a hard drive making excessive noise has been when it's going through it's death throes.

I certainly hope that isn't the case with yourself.

I'm really not sure why your drives are noisy, I don't think defragging would cure the noise but it certainly wouldn't do any harm to try.

 

[ChristopherP]

In my experience, only OLLLLLLDDDDD IDE drives are noise, and Maxtor ones.

The Samsung Spinpoints we have in this house (all 3) are silent. The Seagate SATA one is nearly silent, and the old Quantum Fireball 4Gb is VERY noisey

 

[psd99]

I It sorts file positioning out and helps things run a lot sweeter. It is far from dangerous, in fact the opposite rings true, it's probably dangerous not to defrag.

Just why do you think it's dangerous?

.

because the last time i defragged my files got placed all over the place and i had to reformat! something went majorily wrong!!

i dont like the sound of all my files being moved from a to b surely there must be more of a motive to defrag!

 

[psd99]

In my experience, only OLLLLLLDDDDD IDE drives are noise, and Maxtor ones.

The Samsung Spinpoints we have in this house (all 3) are silent. The Seagate SATA one is nearly silent, and the old Quantum Fireball 4Gb is VERY noisey

it may seem that i always come across a bad batch of harddrives

dooes any1 have their pc on 24/7? i mean i mite turn mine off for like 4 hours in 2 weeks!!!!

my mate told me its best to keep it on cuz constatnly powering to the harddirve and powering down is not healthy

 

[Quadophile]

okay so i aint defragged for like 8 months!

any point of doing it now? how long will it take
im looking at over 400,000 files and close to 300GB!!!!


!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do it overnight as it can take a lot of time especially in your case. If it is not completed by morning its OK, just cancel it and get your job done in the daytime. You can then start all over again and do it the next night as well, since it will pick up from where you left off. Few hours of defrag will surely take care of a good percentage of fragmented files.

IF your drive is on its way out than I am afraid it may not really help 100%, but it will surely improve things a bit. Cannot really say how much. I do not think anyone can really answer that question for you.

We all learn from mistakes, I have also made mistakes, but, that does not mean you cannot change. Just make sure that in future when you get new drives do a bit of maintainance as well, almost every product needs that. It should be part of the ritual.

Its same a buying a car and not changing the engine oil, how long do you think a car would last that way? Not very long, and I bet in time to come it will become noisier and noisier.

 

[floppybootstomp]

dooes any1 have their pc on 24/7? i mean i mite turn mine off for like 4 hours in 2 weeks!!!!

I have three on 24/7. 'Crunching' proteins for the UD Cancer cure program.

my mate told me its best to keep it on cuz constatnly powering to the harddirve and powering down is not healthy

Your mate's talking ********

Utter drivel, a falsehood, misleading information, erroneous advice, total tosh.

Need I say more?

 

[floppybootstomp]

Not sure if these pix will come out OK, but I just defragged. First pic is slightly fragged, 2nd is defragged. It didn't take long as I had already defragmented this morning:

Pix were resized to 700 from 1280 so excuse if they aren't very clear.

 

[Reefsmoka]

I read in a pc news article somewhere, could be internet or a magazine, that you should defrag after installing programs, and if you havent installed anything in 2 week, defrag anyway.

I defrag around twice a week, i am constantly installing and uninstalling. I got 2 hdd in my baby, 1 40gig western digital and 1 80 maxtor dimondmax plus 9. Both are pretty quiet, i cant really hear them and i have my case open all the time.

P.S - I do a scan disc everynow and then too. Dunno what it does, i just like to treat me hd's .

 

[psd99]

i do a virus scan every week and i done one last nite.
i have just over 400,000 files on this pc

that will take ages and ages to defrag!

but it still dont explain why always my harddrives get loud after time!
do u lot fill your harddrives up? or r tney empty? im looking to see why my harddrives get loud im lost! i always end up filling them. right now i only got 4-6 gb left on each harddrive,

 

[Quadophile]

My policy is to upgrade when my hard drive is 60% full, never fill it upto the brim. I am wondering why you keep that much data on your hard drive is it really necessary?

I have two Hard Drives, a PATA 80GB WD 8mb cache and a SATA 120GB Seagate 8mb cache. Windows does not recognise the Linux partition which is 20GB since my configuration is dual boot with Mandrake 10 and Windows XP. If you add the 20 GB to the total you get about 184+ GB which is what the actual capacity would be for the total of 200 GB.

I still have plenty of space in there as you can see from the pic below.

 

[psd99]

60% full?

no way Quad!
whats the point of this? why bother buying another if u still got 40% left! sounds insane.

well im doing a trial rite now on another pc im defragmenting the harddrive its got around 20-25gb of my music cds. this s just a test to see if defragmenting is good for me. so far its telling me that
files are being moved around , which may be a big stuke, which im not very happy about because i got my music arranged so speically!

if i like what has happened and if it helps speed the retrieval of files then and only then ill defrag the 300gb machine!!!

but untill then im keeping stchum!

 

[Me__2001]

when it moves your files it just puts them in a better file arrangement on the drive it doesn't actually affect what folders you have them

 

[psd99]

when it moves your files it just puts them in a better file arrangement on the drive it doesn't actually affect what folders you have them

good job that thats what i was wondering about thanks

it took 6 hours to defrag a 80gb harddrive which isn 67% free!

what a joke!

 

[muckshifter]

i do a virus scan every week and i done one last nite.
i have just over 400,000 files on this pc

that will take ages and ages to defrag!

but it still dont explain why always my harddrives get loud after time!
do u lot fill your harddrives up? or r tney empty? im looking to see why my harddrives get loud im lost! i always end up filling them. right now i only got 4-6 gb left on each harddrive,

You like to live dangerously then ... 4-6gig left on each drive. Hmmm?

Take a leaf out of Quads book, you may not need to leave as much 'space' but you really should leave more than you have. I personally leave a similar amount of space free as Quad, though usually as the HD gets at half full (or half empty) I buy a bigger drive.

It's one reason why defrag took so long to complete.

40gigers can seem quite small, but if managed properly can last the life of the system and some. The advent of the CD-RW and now DVD-RW has helped prolong the life of a 40gig HD.


As for defrag of my drives, well once every other month is fine by me and never takes that long.

 

[psd99]

You like to live dangerously then ... 4-6gig left on each drive. Hmmm?

yer thats me!! Dangerous is my middle name!

 

[Alf]

I defag every month, just to be safe... also i have about 34% free space, it works perfectly.
Hey Quad why do you say never go over 60%?