How important is it to "defragment" these days?

[Powerstroke2000]

Back in the old days, when hard drives wheren't as large as they are today, we where constantly being asked "Have you Defragmented" lately?

I rarely hear of it today, so is it not as necessary these days as it once was?

Those of us with newer computers, running WinXP...SP2 and such, should we still be finding and using the "defrag" icon now and again?

How often do you Defragment your computer?

Thanks..

Dale

[Panama Red]

At least once a month on all my machines and more often on the ones I used most frequently. Quick and easy with XP. Not like the old 98 days.

[Cricket]

I'm not sure if it's "necessary" to defrag often since NTFS is different from FAT32 and fragmentation doesn't affect system performance as much...but I defrag weekly just as a habit (a carry over from running Win98SE for so many years).

Cricket

[Rick Hall]

For optimum performance, it is just as important as it ever was.

[fudtone]

I notice my 2k unit needing a good defrag every 2 months or so... It could easley use it well before but thats when it starts to slow down a bit to much.

[elocal]

Defragging has become a less of a deal nowdays, I remember how it was hyped in the Windows 9x years. It is still recommended to optimize filesystem performance, and tools like diskeeper help to do this task more optimal. That is if you dont want to use the microsoft defragger included in windows.

I personally dont defrag since long ago, I have been using Linux and other OpenSource OSes which filesystem fragmentation is very minimal. And I use Windows so little (games[HL2]) that I dont even bother optimizing things like these.

Regards

[macko72]

I'm downloading large files and have them for few days then delete them and playing games every day so I'm doing my defrag once a week since I have comp and I have no frezes no crashes and similar things.
I recon that defrag is very important no mater do you have NTFS or FAT or WINFS !!!

[Statica]

When NTFS was new, people just assumed that there was something remarkably different between FAT/FAT32 that it did not require a defrag. Tests have shown that NTFS is just as prone to performance degradation caused by fragmentation.
What has changed is the stability of the filesystem. For example, a defrag or a diskcheck was the only way to check for orphaned file fragments with FAT32 - that no longer is the case with NTFS because the filesystem is capable of not "forgetting" to write data back to the drive.

In summary: defragment based on your usage - if you perform a lot of transactions (huge chunks deleted and rewritten) then do it often.

[glc]

You should defragment regularly, and one big advantage to a NT-based OS is that you can work while you defrag. No more safe mode defrag or leaving the machine alone while it's running. I use Diskeeper Pro on my Win2K box here, set it and forget it. It kicks in about 3 times a day, doing one drive at a time (I have 3 drives) and only takes a couple of minutes to run. I wouldn't even notice it except I hear the hard drive chattering and the response gets a bit sluggish. The builtin 2K/NT defrag is based on the Diskeeper engine.