defragmenting too often bad for HDD?

[ajikan]

so, can defragmenting my HDD (74G raptor) too often damage the HD or make it die sooner in any way?

cause I'm using Pinnacle studio 9, and it keeps fragmenting big video files, so I have to defragment every time I finish rendering a project.

just wondering if it will damage my HD.

thanks!

 

[PurdueRy]

technically... I suppose because you are making it work more often...however you are also making it work less by files being placed closer together...so in the end, I would say it doesn't matter.

 

[JEDIYoda]

No!!!

 

[Markbnj]

No way. You're just reading/writing the drive, moving blocks around. That's what it was designed to do .

 

[obeseotron]

Originally posted by: Markbnj
No way. You're just reading/writing the drive, moving blocks around. That's what it was designed to do .

Try rephrasing your statement with another mechanical object and ask yourself how much sense that makes. Driving is what cars are designed to do too, driving them more often makes them fail sooner. Just because it is what something is designed to do doesn't make it harmless, all mechanical systems wear out with use, even normal "what it's designed for" use.

That said, defragmenting itself increases the amount of work a drive has to do, but also has the effect of decreasing the amount of work to access your files normally because they are contiguous rather than fragmented. If you defragment on a reasonable schedule you probably increase the longevity of your system. Doing it like crazy is going to put more stress on the drive than will be saved by having defragmented files, so it's probably not a good idea.

You shouldn't take any of it too seriously, you aren't going to have any very strong impact on drive life one way or the other, and there are a lot of factors more important than how often you defragment that will influence the life of a drive.

 

[SparkyJJO]

If the files are fragmented, by all means defrag - if working the drive hard can shorten its lifespan, a fragemented disk is worse since it is constantly running around finding the bits and pieces of the files instead of just doing it for about 20-30min. Also to me it seems that defragging doesn't run the drive as hard as when it is actually trying to load something that is fragmented.

My .02 for whatever its worth

 

[JEDIYoda]

Originally posted by: obeseotron

Originally posted by: Markbnj
No way. You're just reading/writing the drive, moving blocks around. That's what it was designed to do .

Try rephrasing your statement with another mechanical object and ask yourself how much sense that makes. Driving is what cars are designed to do too, driving them more often makes them fail sooner. Just because it is what something is designed to do doesn't make it harmless, all mechanical systems wear out with use, even normal "what it's designed for" use.

That said, defragmenting itself increases the amount of work a drive has to do, but also has the effect of decreasing the amount of work to access your files normally because they are contiguous rather than fragmented. If you defragment on a reasonable schedule you probably increase the longevity of your system. Doing it like crazy is going to put more stress on the drive than will be saved by having defragmented files, so it's probably not a good idea.

You shouldn't take any of it too seriously, you aren't going to have any very strong impact on drive life one way or the other, and there are a lot of factors more important than how often you defragment that will influence the life of a drive.

Thats not a good example. In fact it is not even applicable in this case.
Actually can we say spoken like a true Newb?
Everything you use mechanically is going to fall apart eventually.
Your example or attempted example was just smoke.....

 

[SnoMunke]

Originally posted by: SparkyJJO
If the files are fragmented, by all means defrag - if working the drive hard can shorten its lifespan, a fragemented disk is worse since it is constantly running around finding the bits and pieces of the files instead of just doing it for about 20-30min. Also to me it seems that defragging doesn't run the drive as hard as when it is actually trying to load something that is fragmented.

My .02 for whatever its worth

I'll give you a dime for that .02....

Good explanation.

 

[Bozo Galora]

Myth #4 :
Defragmenting the hard disk will stress the needle (head actuator).
Truth :


That is actually contrary to the truth. Defragmenting the hard disk may involve a lot of seeking as the hard disks rearranges its data in a contiguous fashion. This allows the read/write heads to read large amounts of data without seeking all over the platters.

However, after defragmentation, the hard disk no longer needs to seek all over the platters for your data. This reduces the amount of head actuator movements as well as greatly increase the hard disk's read/write performance.

Therefore, while it may be technically correct to say that defragmenting your hard disk will stress the head actuators, the truth is defragmenting your hard disk will reduce the amount of seeking from then on and thus reduce the head actuators' workload.

http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=84&var2=0

 

[obeseotron]

Originally posted by: JEDIYoda

Originally posted by: obeseotron

Originally posted by: Markbnj
No way. You're just reading/writing the drive, moving blocks around. That's what it was designed to do .

Try rephrasing your statement with another mechanical object and ask yourself how much sense that makes. Driving is what cars are designed to do too, driving them more often makes them fail sooner. Just because it is what something is designed to do doesn't make it harmless, all mechanical systems wear out with use, even normal "what it's designed for" use.

That said, defragmenting itself increases the amount of work a drive has to do, but also has the effect of decreasing the amount of work to access your files normally because they are contiguous rather than fragmented. If you defragment on a reasonable schedule you probably increase the longevity of your system. Doing it like crazy is going to put more stress on the drive than will be saved by having defragmented files, so it's probably not a good idea.

You shouldn't take any of it too seriously, you aren't going to have any very strong impact on drive life one way or the other, and there are a lot of factors more important than how often you defragment that will influence the life of a drive.

Thats not a good example. In fact it is not even applicable in this case.
Actually can we say spoken like a true Newb?
Everything you use mechanically is going to fall apart eventually.
Your example or attempted example was just smoke.....

I was disputing the foundation of the statement - that putting something through normal use doesn't have a negative effect, not the conclusion - that defragmenting is on balance healthy for the drive. Read the whole comment, what I said is totally consistent with what Bozo posted from Rojak.

The car analogy isn't perfect, but it is an example of a mechanical system that wears out through regular use, the same way a hard drive or any mechanical system does.

You might want to take a look at my avatar and see that I have been a member here for 6 and a half years vs not even a year for you before calling me a newb.

 

[Apocalypse X]

Originally posted by: obeseotron

Originally posted by: JEDIYoda

Originally posted by: obeseotron

Originally posted by: Markbnj
No way. You're just reading/writing the drive, moving blocks around. That's what it was designed to do .

Try rephrasing your statement with another mechanical object and ask yourself how much sense that makes. Driving is what cars are designed to do too, driving them more often makes them fail sooner. Just because it is what something is designed to do doesn't make it harmless, all mechanical systems wear out with use, even normal "what it's designed for" use.

That said, defragmenting itself increases the amount of work a drive has to do, but also has the effect of decreasing the amount of work to access your files normally because they are contiguous rather than fragmented. If you defragment on a reasonable schedule you probably increase the longevity of your system. Doing it like crazy is going to put more stress on the drive than will be saved by having defragmented files, so it's probably not a good idea.

You shouldn't take any of it too seriously, you aren't going to have any very strong impact on drive life one way or the other, and there are a lot of factors more important than how often you defragment that will influence the life of a drive.

Thats not a good example. In fact it is not even applicable in this case.
Actually can we say spoken like a true Newb?
Everything you use mechanically is going to fall apart eventually.
Your example or attempted example was just smoke.....

I was disputing the foundation of the statement - that putting something through normal use doesn't have a negative effect, not the conclusion - that defragmenting is on balance healthy for the drive. Read the whole comment, what I said is totally consistent with what Bozo posted from Rojak.

The car analogy isn't perfect, but it is an example of a mechanical system that wears out through regular use, the same way a hard drive or any mechanical system does.

You might want to take a look at my avatar and see that I have been a member here for 6 and a half years vs not even a year for you before calling me a newb.

Thast funny! I have been a member here for over 3 months and you know what I have seen?

People who have been on these forums for years who do not know didly squat about anything.

But those same people think that becuase they have been here for 6 years was it(?) that what they say is the truth even if it bears no semblance to fact.

hmmm

 

[alcoholbob]

That's true everywhere in society. It's called "seniority."

aka "do what I say, if you know what's good for you."

 

[F1shF4t]

First of all its a raptor its designed and rated to go flat out 24/7 for years cause its a workstation/ server drive.

Secondly everyone who said that defraging actually reduces stress is right, so i guess i wont even to go into that.

And another thing when something is meant to operate its better for it to operate at its right ammount than not at all, for example its much better for the car engine to run than to do stop starts as thats whats more stressfull, and guess where the idea came from to get old cars to regularly do long drives to keep everything working, (i have an old car and i can tell that its struggles more when its been not used for 2 + days, ie trouble starting)

So the best thing to do is not to care really just use it normally cause that what its mean for and will last longest at.

 

[letdown427]

Originally posted by: Apocalypse
Thast funny! I have been a member here for over 3 months and you know what I have seen?

People who have been on these forums for years who do not know didly squat about anything.

But those same people think that becuase they have been here for 6 years was it(?) that what they say is the truth even if it bears no semblance to fact.

hmmm

No, actually, his post was perfectly legitimate, he was referring to the way galvanized implied that doing what the drive is supposed to do won't cause it any harm. So in fact, you're argument is smoke, as opposed to his example.

I think what galvanized meant was that it won't significantly shorten the life of the drive, as it was meant to be used constantly (server drive here) so using it constantly won't mean it last for a shorter period of time that can be expected.

In all fairness, something is going to fail eventually, if you've got backups etc, then it's no problem, it has a huge warranty too so you've got a few years without worry.

 

[spikespiegal]

In all fairness, something is going to fail eventually, if you've got backups etc, then it's no problem, it has a huge warranty too so you've got a few years without worry.

Problem is, most people don't. Too many housewives not running RAID 1 and dumb kids running RAID 0 because it makes load time with their favorite game 5% faster.

I rarely defrag, and do you wanna know why? Because unless you really start packing the drive tight it's not needed that often, especially with NTFS.

As a general rule I never let my working volumes get over 50% full. That in itself is the biggest performance increase and stress reliever for big, monster drives. While data will eventually become increasingly fragged over time, it happens at a much slower rate than when the drive is 75% or more full, and the drives stay faster.

 

[Capt Caveman]

I schedule a defrag of my raptor boot drive everynight.

 

[Markbnj]

Try rephrasing your statement with another mechanical object and ask yourself how much sense that makes. Driving is what cars are designed to do too, driving them more often makes them fail sooner.

Yeah, ok. I'm sure that defragging will use up those 60k hours MTBF 0.0001% faster. Does that make you feel better?

If you really want to pursue this analogy (hey, it's your reputation ), a proper one would go more like this:

Dear Anandtech:

I heard that driving my car down to Jiffy Lube will make it fail faster? Is this true?

Signed,
Concerned

 

[obeseotron]

I apologize for an arrogance I may have displayed by my six and a half years comment, people claiming superiority = greater knowledge bother me too.

I was irritated at being called a newb myself for saying something that is in fact true. As I said defragmenting is on balace good, and you will not have any significant effect on the longevity of the drive doing it or not anyway. All of you guys are saying the same thing, you just hate my car analogy.

 

[Dowfen]

Originally posted by: Markbnj

Try rephrasing your statement with another mechanical object and ask yourself how much sense that makes. Driving is what cars are designed to do too, driving them more often makes them fail sooner.

Yeah, ok. I'm sure that defragging will use up those 60k hours MTBF 0.0001% faster. Does that make you feel better?

If you really want to pursue this analogy (hey, it's your reputation ), a proper one would go more like this:

Dear Anandtech:

I heard that driving my car down to Jiffy Lube will make it fail faster? Is this true?

Signed,
Concerned

Man, not to defend the car analogy (it was ok), but your posts contribute nothing.

Eric

Edit: To get the quote in there.

 

[Markbnj]

Man, not to defend the car analogy (it was ok), but your posts contribute nothing.

You're right, and that's because the analogy was silly, and didn't really deserve a contribution.