How often do you defrag your drives?

[Harrison]

I was just thinking that I've not defragged the drives on my PCs for some time. My Emulation system and server should both be OK because I only formatted and reinstalled both a couple of months ago, but my main PC's system drive must be in need of defragging by now.

So how often do you defrag your Harddrives?

And do you actually think it's worth it? Do you notice any real performance gain after?

[LowercaseE]

It's been a few months since I've last defragged my home PC. I don't do it as often as I should but I don't really ever have much reason to. As for performance gains after doing so, it's hard to say. I really only use my PC for the internet and emulation gaming so I've never really noticed any performance boosts from a defrag.

[rayzorblue]

I defragged mine last month for the first time in at least 6-10 months and can honestly say i didnt notice any difference in performance watsoever and i am also a heavy torrent user which is meant to be bad for fragmentation but i seriously noticed nothing.

[Harrison]

Ah, but is it? Downloading large files places them as a continuous chunk of data on the HD with next to no fragmentation at all. It would only be if you download a lot of small files that they would start to split and be scattered all over the place in any available free space found.

I've seen many discussions on other forums about the importance of defragmenting HDs if they use NTFS and most people seem to draw the conclusion that is doesn't really have much benefit compared to the old days of the crap FAT file system.

[Teho]

I've had this PC with these drives for a year now and haven't defragged them even once. And I haven't noticed that any of them are particularily slowing down. I used to defrag every now and then before, but never noticed any gain at all. So I just don't bother with it at all now, and everything is fine. Well apart from that HD that fails every now and then but that isn't a fragmentation issue.

It did cross my mind the other day that it may be time to do it though. Perhaps I will soon.

[AlexJ]

I haven't done if for a few months - never sure if it actually speeds things up at all, it sort of seems slightly faster but that could just be a placebo-style effect.

[Demon Cleaner]

I don't defrag very often, mostly it's only applyable for the disks which have a lot of traffic, otherwise you don't have to defrag.

[Stephen Coates]

About 4 or 5 years probably.

I was going to say 2 or 3 years but forgot that it is now 2007.

[AlexJ]

2 or 3 years + 1 year is 3 or 4 years not 4 or 5.

[TiredOfLife]

Nobody using FFS Dir Cache then?

[Stephen Coates]

2 or 3 years + 1 year is 3 or 4 years not 4 or 5.


errrr, huh?

[Demon Cleaner]

You said 2-3 years. Then you noticed we have 2007, thus 1 year more. So 2+1 year = 3 and 3+1 year = 4. So you should have said 3-4 and not 4-5.

[Harrison]

Unless of course Steve still thought it was 2005!

[Stephen Coates]

No, I shouldn't have said that. I was guessing because I don't keep a record of when I do stuff like this.

[J T]

How often do I defrag the HDD?

Not often. In fact, I don't think I've ever done it for the one I'm using at the moment. But then I've only just filled it up - now I need to make backups - or just buy another HDD.

Think I'll probably just buy another one and have it solely for music. And rip ALL of our CDs to it too. That'd be a fair old collection of music :shades: