Defragmenting A Hard Drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter D. Spencer Hines
  • Start date Start date
D

D. Spencer Hines

Is it true that one can damage a hard drive or an external hard drive used
for backup by defragmenting it too often, say three or four times a week or
so?

DSH
 
Thank you kindly.

However, this seems to contradict what you say infra:

"Consider also that the defragmenter puts a high load on the computer,
particularly on the hard disk, and will thus make it fail earlier than it
would otherwise fail. This risk should be part of the consideration."
"Don't Become a Defrag Junkie"
<http://winhlp.com/WxDefrag.htm>
Click to expand...

What do you think?

DSH
 
As I understand it, it would require substantially more defragmenting
than 'three or four times a week' to increase the MTBF sufficiently to
place a hard disk in danger of failure during its expected lifetime.

Earl Grey
 
How about once a day?

Can someone show us some studies on the MTBF figures for regularly
defragmenting a hard drive?

DSH
 
D. Spencer Hines said:
Thank you kindly.

However, this seems to contradict what you say infra:

"Consider also that the defragmenter puts a high load on the computer,
particularly on the hard disk, and will thus make it fail earlier
than it would otherwise fail. This risk should be part of the
consideration."

What do you think?

DSH
Click to expand...

The only real wear on a hard drive is the bearings and head movement
mechanism. Since it's spinning AT ALL TIMES the computer is on, and various
things are happening onthe background to keep the heads moving around the
platters, you'll never notice any "wear" from defragging. Someone is being
a super purist dummy to say differently. Any given hard drive will fail
sometime between this second and several years from now and it won't be
governed by how many defrags you do.

Pop`
 
Do a Google search on hard drives and MBTF

D. Spencer Hines said:
How about once a day?

Can someone show us some studies on the MTBF figures for regularly
defragmenting a hard drive?

DSH
Click to expand...
 
Now that's a very interesting opinion and seems to be grounded in experience
and some knowledge of hard drives.

But is he actually correct?

What do others think?

Will frequent defragmenting put a seriously high load on both the computer
and the hard drive and make them fail faster?

DSH
 
Thu said:
As I understand it, it would require substantially more defragmenting
than 'three or four times a week' to increase the MTBF sufficiently to
place a hard disk in danger of failure during its expected lifetime.
Click to expand...

I agree with what you meant, but I think you meant "decrease" not
"increase".

Increasing the mean time between failure would make the disk last
longer.
 
Since it's spinning AT ALL TIMES the computer is on

Well, in this respect at least, it's wrong. I just bought a Seagate
400Gb external USB2 drive and it's got an ingenious mechanism that
causes it to spin down one second before my every attempt to use it. How
it knows that I'm about to give it some work to do, I don't know. :-)

I'm hoping that the Seagate people can give me something to tweak its
"work coming" detection algorithm. In the meantime a small program that
accesses the drive every few minutes should stop it "nodding off".
 
Steve said:
Well, in this respect at least, it's wrong. I just bought a Seagate
400Gb external USB2 drive and it's got an ingenious mechanism that
causes it to spin down one second before my every attempt to use it.
How it knows that I'm about to give it some work to do, I don't know.
:-)
I'm hoping that the Seagate people can give me something to tweak its
"work coming" detection algorithm. In the meantime a small program
that accesses the drive every few minutes should stop it "nodding
off".
Click to expand...

lol, that's probably caused by a setting in Control Panel's Power Options
settings. Worth looking into at least.

Pop`
 
lol, that's probably caused by a setting in Control Panel's Power Options
settings. Worth looking into at least.
Click to expand...

I have "Harddrives power off: never" in my power settings. I think that
USB connected drives somehow don't count as "drives" in this case. I
don't think that the system has access to the control functions on such
drives.

Seagate wrote back to me saying that there was no way to change the
spin-down timer.
My "keepalive between 06:00 and 22:00" program is already running.
 
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