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 To
Defrag or Not to Defrag?
QUESTION:
I'm always
reading computer magazines where they instruct to
defrag, defrag. Is there any wear and tear on the disc
when you defrag it?
ANSWER:
A hard disk is
a mechanical device, so any time the disk heads move
(when you access data on the disk for any purpose),
there will be some amount of wear and tear. However, the
physical effect of defragmenting is minimal. In fact,
leaving the disk fragmented will ultimately cause more
wear and tear.
Here's why: when a disk is fragmented, the data that
makes up one file is split into pieces and stored in
different locations on the disk. That's why your disk
access gets slower as the disk gets fragmented. This
means the disk heads have to make more movements each
time they access those files, in order to go to all the
different places on the disk where the pieces of a file
are stored. When you defrag, these file pieces are
placed together, so not only is access faster, but the
disk doesn't have to work as hard and thus you save wear
and tear on the physical components. We have found that
Diskeeper 9.0 is the desk disk defragmenting program to
use.
Find more about Diskeeper here
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