Is Disk Defragmenter bad for hard drive?

If I defrag my hard drive often, will it harm the hard drive? Anyone?

 

only in the sense that you are "working" the HD and technically, anytime your HD is "working", it's "bad" for it.

defrag'ing is a good idea, but there's no need to overdo it. yor really only need to defrag after you've installed/moved/deleted lots of data

 

it will shorten your HD life as it does extensive writing on your HD. I don't see any benefit in defragging HD too often, it doesn't help much unless you move program data like crazy.

 

On the other hand, if you defrag more often, it'll need to write less each time. So no, it's not really harmful to defrag often. It might be a waste of time, however...

And just to be clear here, a HD can handle *a lot* of reads/writes. It's not something you practically need to concern yourself with.

 

ok, thanks for the feedbacks.

I also noticed that occasionally my E1505 would stop at a certain percentage of defragmenting. It's not like the computer freezes, it's just defragmenting "freezes". I have to end disk defragmenter and re-run it again, and it usually defrags ok (100% completed) the next time. Does that occur to anyone else too?

 

make sure to turn everything off when defrag'ing; antivirus especially

 

And try to find a defragger other than the standard Windows XP one. Trust me, it makes a big difference, both on how long it takes, and on the effect it has.

 

I would recommend Diskkeeper, great program. Defrag like once every 3 months and defrag after major wipes. Thats what I do
-Ham

 

One way that I found that works when de-fragging, is to boot into safe mode and run the de-fragging process from there. The system does not load all of the background process and only loads the minimal drivers necessary.

This seems to speed up the de-fragging process considerably.

 

Not defragging is as damaging defragging. Not defragging also makes your system slower.

If you defragment, it moves your system files around creating more reading and writing on the drive.

If you don't defrag, you have to read a lot more, and perform more writes, because data isn't continual.

As far as making a big deal about defragging or not, if you buy a good drive, it should last a long time regardless of what you do.

 

Yes, and yes. Depending on how many small you create/delete and how often you move things around and all is what can tell you how often you should defragment. I normally end up doing it about once or twice a month, but I move a lot of large files around. If you don't do that often, then you can wait longer and still keep performance up.