Defragging too much

uch

I heard a couple of years ago that you shouldn't defrag too often as it can shorten the Life of your disks, Is this true or rubbish ?
We are using a network defrag utility and need to run it fairly often on some servers and Workstation.

Stark

It would probably damage the life of cheap-ass hard drives I reckon. The ones that fail after so many hours of use that is. Google use that kind as it's more cost effective to buy loads of cheap hard drives and run an effective backup/recovery strategy than it is to buy a few expensive hard drives. Modern hard drives that you pay good money for though shouldn't be affected too much.

Modern filesystems claim to need less defragging that filesystems of old. Although I think that claim is bull**** for NTFS. It's supposed to hold somewhat true for Linux filesystems such as ext2/3 and reiserfs etc. though.

Matthewthebig

On a similar note

whenever i defrag my hard drive it says that some files could not be defragged and to look at the report, however when i view the report there is nothing and it still won't defrag

Does anyone know what could be causing this?

Stark

What defrag program are you using? Some files are used by system processes and are more difficult to get access to (Diskeeper and the like are better able to handle these). Some defrag programs require you reboot in order to finish the defrag process on startup. Directory entries and the pagefile are examples of files that are difficult to defrag.

Matthewthebig

I am using the one on XP SP2

i assume i should use a third party one?

Stark

If you want a really thorough defrag then yes. Diskeeper is my recommended choice. The XP defrag utility is actually a stripped down version of an earlier Diskeeper release

XP defrag should still be good for your basic defrag though.

Matthewthebig

thank you muchly

Karoma

& launch from Safe Mode (Or at boot time) for optimal result.

Duffman

Karoma wrote:

& launch from Safe Mode (Or at boot time) for optimal result.

Use something like Diskeeper from a normal boot, it will run a boot time defrag to move whatever it missed.

Don't use safe mode unless you don't want to use your computer again for a few days :P DMA is disabled so disk access speeds are painfully slow.