Windows Defragmenter

[Magicb6076]

Ok what is the truth with Windows Defragmenter? Is it a good thing to run or is it bad. I have heard many people say that it is unhealthy for your hard drive and reduces its life span. Someone told me that Windows XP does a good enough job so that you don't have to defrag ever even if it says to do so after an analyze. What is the truth guys? Thanks, Brandon

[digitalfreedom64]

Never heard of the defragmenter being unhealthy for your hard drive, quite the opposite actually. the defragmenter is meant to improve system performance. As far as XP is concerned, I've noticed that it is more resilient to fragmentation than previous Windows Operating systems but not immune to it so it's still a good idea to defragment the hard drive.

[TwoRails]

XP's defragger does just fine. The analyzer can say you don't need to defrag if the percentage is small enough, but you can always defrag whether it says you don't need to or not. I often defrag several times until files stop getting moved around.

In pratice, defragging doesn't hurt the drive; if so, I'd need a new drive every couple of months.

[Magicb6076]

Ok, sounds like its OK to go along with defragging the hard drive. Thanks a lot!

[MaxRat]

I read the same thing you posted about scandisk...

[digitalfreedom64]

Well I'll put it this way, I use Diskeeper Defragmenter for about a year now and it's scheduled to defrag once a day. So according to what those other people have said my drive should have died long ago and it hasn't.

[Magicb6076]

What is up with Scandisk? Is there something I do not know?

[TwoRails]

Scandisk checks the drive for errors in Windows versions prior to XP. With XP, it is once again called Chkdsk for Check Disk.

[mushroom]

Originally Posted by crashoverride Well I'll put it this way, I use Diskeeper Defragmenter for about a year now and it's scheduled to defrag once a day. So according to what those other people have said my drive should have died long ago and it hasn't.

We run a couple of servers and several worsktations and have been using it to defrag for a pretty long time, have had no issues whatsoever. On my home system, I've set it to run in the background and it run daily, keeps the frag levels under check. I personally feel that a disk clean up , chkdsk and defrag regularly are essential to keep the system healthy, esp since too much crap gets dumped into the system in no time nowadays.

[nonpanicker]

MS suggests defragging the HDD whenever we add or delete a lot of files, or download updates, patches hotfixes etc.Its good to keep the system clean and take out unwanted files and then defragment it.why should it be bad?I think the burden on the HD to access the numerous file fragments is whts bad.I'm yet to hear of anyone whoz suffered a HD problem due to defragmenting frequently or even daily. As for the XP defragger, stopped using it because its slow.
http://www.microsoft.com/AtWork/getstarted/speed.mspx