To Defrag or not to Defrag

[Robbbyg]

ive noticed a lot of posts on recovery of data from hd,
with mixed results.

There is a higher chance of recovery of reclaiming that lost data if you DONT Defrag your hdd , when you defrag windows moves your files to a different location to where it thinks you will get the most performance/reliability, all those files getting moved, the head written copied rewritten moved puts more strain on the parts,

I really believe that defragging is NOT neccessary, and any difference is minimal to say the least, this hdd im using now is running as fast as the day i got it, faster in fact, and i heve never defragged it, (i have formatted) and its going on 3 yrs old.

Also ive noticed that HDD last longer when they dont get defragged
Sure in the days of windows 95, file allocation was pretty crappy and everyone did it, but loking at maps of hdds under xp /vista , even after years of use youll find that theyre pretty much in order anyway.

That lost file may have been reclaimed if you didnt defrag your hard drive last month.

And if your worried your pc is getting sluggish, then tune it up, clear out those old programs, back up your data and reinstall windows every 6 months

[Dave@Bytes]

I agree that modern Operating Systems do not need to be defragged--by modern I mean Vista and 7. XP was a wreck with data.

You do bring up good points with recovering data. Hopefully, people will have backups and will never have to resort to third-party recovery solutions for data. But as you said, the more the hdd is overwritten, the less likely you are to recover files. And the more your drive works, the more likely it is to fail.

I'm still a fan of backing up and defragging every couple of months. I already know the drive will fail. It's only a matter of time. So every day I prepare for that.

Good post.

[PC_Repair_Man]

I don't want to completly disagree with you but I think that the need for a HDD to require defragging is based strictly upon the user. I mean people like you and me, the people that you would consider to be power users tend to keep a very nice and tidy system. We do this because we understand that when you keep Windows nice and tidy it performs at peak performance with less issues.

Now on the other hand you have the users that I deal with everyday, the average joe. I see the most cluttered, junked-up, half-running systems that sometimes are in such bad shape I just have to scratch my head and wonder how in the heck is this computer still running! They won't bring their computer in when it first starts to act up, they wait a year or two until it barely computes and then it's my job to clean up the mess.

Now as much as I would love to just reformat and reinstall Windows on every PC that comes across my workbench people just don't want to give over to that option very much. I'm always left cleaning up Windows to the best of my ability and we all know this means deleted tons and tons of junk, uninstalling dozens of programs, clearing out hundreds of peices of spyware and malware and a couple of viruses. The end result is a fragged out HDD with files scattered from one end to the other and a computer that is still not running quiet as fast as you want it to be when you return it to the customer. By defragging and cleaning up that huge mess that I made I always see a performance boost and about 90% of the time it is much more than minimal.

My point is I do agree with you to a certain extent. You just have to look at the full spectrum in regards to how well people maintain their hard drives. I think you are completly right about a hard drive that has always been well maintained but I find you to be a little off-base with the more realistic and common hard drive that is cluttered to the max. No offense though, I think you have some great insight, I love people that think outside the box and the norm from what we're always led to believe.

[Parsie]

I've found defrag beneficial on my desktop that I use for gaming and photoediting. And on my laptop with the slow 5400 rpm drive, defrag really helps. I haven't seen any drawbacks from defrag so far in 10 years of using Windows based systems, and I don't intend to stop defragging.

PS: defrag is for the *filesystem* i.e. the logical volume, and not
*directly* for the actual physical hard drive (or other storage
hardware). It must be understood in this context; there seems to be
some confusion regarding this in the original post.

[CertifiedLaptopRepair.com]

Running a ScanDisc with the option of automatically repairing bad sectors PRIOR to a defrag is an easy optimization choice, and only takes a few extra minutes.

Anytime a customer PC comes to my bench that needs a tune-up, and the PC is more than 2 years old, I always run a scandisk first. This reduces the chance of files being written back to a bad sector in the defrag process, loosing drivers, or corrupting Windows files.

Another thing I do often is restart the PC two to four times immediately after a defrag. This helps Windows reindex those files and increases boot time after defragmentation.

How many times have you ran a defrag, and after such the PC ran SLOWER than before the defrag? Then its time to reinstall Windows.

Also, I've always been able to recover lost files from PC's that were defragmented often. Defragmentation has nothing to do with the ability to recover a "lost" file. Simply because you can't see the file doesn't necessarily mean it's gone for good. It's there, you just have to recover it using the proper software and techniques. File recovery can be difficult, but that is what we're paid for.

[PC_Repair_Man]

Running a ScanDisc with the option of automatically repairing bad sectors PRIOR to a defrag is an easy optimization choice, and only takes a few extra minutes.

Anytime a customer PC comes to my bench that needs a tune-up, and the PC is more than 2 years old, I always run a scandisk first. This reduces the chance of files being written back to a bad sector in the defrag process, loosing drivers, or corrupting Windows files.

Another thing I do often is restart the PC two to four times immediately after a defrag. This helps Windows reindex those files and increases boot time after defragmentation.

That's some pretty good advice, I'll have to start implementing those ideas!

[Bama19642]

I've seen people say don't defrag ever, just now is the first tho, and others say don't defrag too often because it wears the drive out.

I've been using this pc (XP) over three years, with most of the work allotted to gaming and video conversion. There are some times my drive will be recommended defragged a week from the last time, with close to 20% fragmentation. How much more stressful can it be to defrag than it was to fragment? If a file doesn't need to be moved it's not. I back it up every couple of weeks, but I couldn't imagine reinstalling the OS every six months. 90% of the programs on here are used at least occasionally, and there are almost two full columns of them.

I think the defragging along with cleaning junk, the registry and regular malware scans keep mine running smooth. It's also nice to know some repairmen figure out how to do this themselves. I hate to hear "You have to reformat" without really knowing what the problem is. It's different if you say it will cost X and it still might not work, but for only Y I can reformat. Reformatting first is like saying "I don't really feel like finding the problem".

[Gangsta-Nun]

Ahh thanks, this has been helpful, however me being a Newbie, can somebody tell me which Defragging software works best.

Does Windows one work fine? (I've heard if you do it in Safe Mode it does it better)

Is Defraggler any good?
I used PerfectDisk took a while, is this anygood?
Norton SpeedDisk : Never used this but is it any good?

[Bama19642]

I think most people find the Auslogics Disk Defragmenter to be very fast compared to the one included in Windows. You can find it at download.cnet.com.

[PC_Repair_Man]

Bama is right, Auslogics is the best.