[sheffdan]

Hey just wondering how often do you defragment your hard drives? I do mine every week after virus and spyware checks etc.

Ive heard that defraging too much can do more harm than good, but ive also heard that it should be done twice a week?

[Joelc]

I never bother on my windows machines. Never really worry about it unless it seems really slow. On my non-windows machines, I have no need to.

Joel

[Ivor&Mel]

Originally Posted by Joelc

I never bother on my windows machines. Never really worry about it unless it seems really slow. On my non-windows machines, I have no need to.

Joel

Have to agree with this. Must be 4 years since I did a defrag on any of my Windows machines. However, I decided to do one on my laptop last night And am wondering why I bothered! Does anyone find any significant speed-up after doing one? I have never found any noticeable difference. And I am reluctant to do a defrag on my desktop PC which has two 300GB drives!

[Appolo]

I use Ashampoo Magic Defrag & it defrags my drive automatically,it just comes on when needed & works away in the background.

[Solomon1]

Originally Posted by Ivor&Mel

Does anyone find any significant speed-up after doing one? I have never found any noticeable difference.

tend to defrag regularly, coz your sposed to....but not really ever noticed an increase in speed either!

[marmite]

i used to alot, having a laptop, but then i got an external hard drive so space wasnt an issue and speed never was anyway

[melthebell]

i dont do it very often these days tbh

your supposed to if you do a lot of file moving / moving large files around
i suppose if all you do is create a small document here and there theres no advantage

[fnkysknky]

Next to never. With NTFS it's not as much as an issue as on FAT32 and with the size and speed of hard drives now you don't tend to notice any performance gain. Setting the size of the swap file reduces any fragmentation as well.

[Rich]

I never defrag, don't need to cos I have 2 massive hard drives.

[Joelc]

Originally Posted by Rich

I never defrag, don't need to cos I have 2 massive hard drives.

Its not space that is the factor here. Fragmentations occour when the disk places files anywshere on the disk. Obviously having chunks of data all over the drive, especally towards the end of the drive, means the disk heads have further to travel to read them. Defragmentation picks up all these little pieces and moves them all to the beginning of the drive, which speeds up seek time for data chunks.

Its only a real issue if you have a lot of big files, or you have disk intensive programs such as databases running.

Most UNIX filesystems dont suffer from this as they tend to shove the data as near to the beginning of the drive as possible. NTFS was designed to address part of this problem, and in part, it does. Just not 100% yet.

Joel

[wendygs]

Only defrag when SF IT experts eg JoelC et al have advised me to do so.

[GazB]

You're supposed to defrag every month.. But I regularly analyse my C: drive and it hasn't needed defragging since I bought it 18 months ago

[sheffdan]

Lots of different views there!.....Thanks people

[scarby]

I analyze the hard drive once a week, if it don't need doing, it don't get done

[esme]

about once every two months on average depends if the analysis program says do it

according to the M$ course I went on an NTFS system partition will supposedly slow the machine down by about 10% per year if it doesn't get defragmented so you are looking at maybe 1% per month slowdown for leaving it and the same increase per month for defragmenting it.

trust the analyze tool

[Joelc]

I don't trust Microsoft, nevermind any of their tools..

Joel

[sccsux]

Originally Posted by Joelc

I don't trust Microsoft tools..

Nope. I don't trust Bill Gates, either