Do you defragment your computer?

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i only do it like once every two months even though i never see any speed difference. The funny thing is my filesystem has over 30K free space fragments and it still doesn't fragment a lot

I run CCleaner every time I shut down my computer, SpyBot and Avira once a week, and I defrag the HDD once a month.

on the rare occasions i am very bored, i will watch, slack-jawed with fascination, the little colored boxes rearrange themselves in the big grid.

I probably should defrag more. Usually when I attempt it though my computer says my drives don't need it.

I didn't even know about defragmenting on my computer until I asked a couple of guys working at a computer shop what to do to stop lagging on my computer. I think my computer does it automatically but even when I do it myself I see no real difference.

back when i had a 120meg hard drive, 4 megs of RAM and a 380SX cpu, it improved performance [speed] a bit. it isn't so noticeable on newer more powerful machines.

I build pc's and even I enjoy this activity!


Funny though, the whole idea is to squish all your files as close together as you can so the head has less distance to travel.. in doing so you will read/write more to certain parts of the hard disk causing wear.

But in reality the moving parts will fail way before the disk reaches its read/write limits..

Of course you never want to defrag a solid state drive.. Waste of time and life capacity for it.

Nup. No need to. I don't run Windows.

Unix has been storing files without significant fragmentation for decades.

Defragmentation is a Windows problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation#Approach_and_defragmenters_by_file-system_type

Compare "NTFS" (Windows) and "Linux ext2, ext3, and ext4" (the most common Linux file systems).

Linux avoids fragmenting files, and rarely needs disk defragmentation - I have never bothered. Windows needs regular defragmentation.

I'm converting. I put Ubuntu on my Netbook.

i didn't know solid-state drives [presumably with no moving parts] could wear out! what wears them out? friction/heat of electrons?

I remember I used to do that with the old win 98 defragger . It actually showed every single cluster, so it was a really long list.
Then the new ones in XP and Vista were just a colored strip.
Then I found defraggler.


I don't defrag very often, really, the computer apparently does it automatically already. Last time I had to defrag it was to shrink a partition to make a new one and put linux on it, there was some mft stuff in the way and it was hell to find the proper tools.

Got to admire Fnord's discipline, I only run CCleaner monthly, Spybot like every half a year, and Avast only when I suspect I've catched something.



http://ssd-life.com/eng/ssdlife-faq-fre ... tions.html

I think I read newer ones didn't have that problem, or at least it wasn't as pronounced, but I haven't really looked into it yet

As far as I know, it's the action of the electrons pooling in the substrate in their cells... and they wear down the insulator between pockets eventually. Probably friction.. just very tiny.

Same thing can happen to flash drives..

Although it's proper coding now to make sure the software "Write levels" or moves around.. not staying in the same code block for long. That's even important on arduino stuff if you use the built in flash memory.



What do I know. It's all amazing is what I gather!

^^^
i guess NOTHING in this universe lasts forever or even very long in the grand scheme of things.

I have to admit that when I was running XP on an older computer there were several times that I thought the defragging might help, but I inly actually had to defrag once in the 3.5 years that I owned the system. Win98 with FAT32 OTOH needed to be defragged every month or so. Linux, OTOH doesnot need to be defragged, so I don't do so.

Exactly my thoughts on the subject!

Defragging was more of a big deal back in the 386 era with my first 40 MEGAbyte drive. DOS-based program... chunka-chunka-chunka... watch the screen line up all pretty.

Solid state.

I do not have to defrag anymore.