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Originally Posted by Cricket
I defrag my computers once a week and have been doing so for over 10 years with all the various computers I've owned. I don't feel defragging would cause premature HDD failure because most times when I do defrag it only takes a few minutes and I feel that's nothing to be concerned with. I do feel a little anxious when I do run defrag on a computer that hasn't been defragged in months (or even years) and the defrag takes a really long time but I don't think I've ever seen a computer die during or right after a defrag has been performed.
 Cricket |
I completely agree with you. I have never heard of anyone's drive dying because of defrag. NTFS systems are supposed to deal with the issue if fragmentation better, but they are in no way immune. Fragmentation definitely affects performance, whether its noticeable or not would depend on each person's usage. Cant imagine servers not being defragged and yet giving their best. Even on my personal PC, if i dont defrag, with just downloading movies, browsing, playing with photographs, the drive actually gets fragmented very fast.
There is the argument that defragmenting stresses out the drive. when a drive is defragmented regularly, each defrag takes lesser time. No issues, great performance, the system runs as if it were brand new. However if you leave it fragmented, it lags and hangs. My defrag gets done in less than 20 minutes every 2-3 days. That would definitely be less stressful on the drive than having to access say numerous fragments of a movie file for like 2 hours.