arcorob
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Dec 22, 2013
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I would not defrag often. Once you have done a defrag, your music files should stay put. Defragging introduces a risk of small data corruptions and is pretty tough on your HDD's mechanical parts. On a fairly full disc doing a defrag that takes several hours you are basically putting a few months worth of wear and tear on the mechanical parts. So defragging should only be done when it's really needed.
Where do you guys get this stuff? That is not true at all. You music files will go exactly in the free space the defrag puts them (whole) along with other files, WHOLE. any addition and deletion of files again creates fragmentation (but in this case not necessarily the files that were contiguous and have not been moved)
Defrag DOES not introduce data corruption and the only time you put wear and tear (as you call it) is by WAITING months to defrag instead of doing it weekly. It should only take hours on
1) a very old machine
2) a VERY heavily fragmented hard drive...Like one you waited months to do...
Shesh...where does this crap come from ? I mean serious? People who spout this stuff cannot be in the business of supporting SYSTEMS. I am sorry to be so vehement, I really am, but this is how false information gets propagated across the internet. You write it, someone believes it, they write it...next thing you know, someone else sees it and thinks...It must be true, I read it on the internet.
Excerpt from a technical white paper on SQL Server fragmentation (which differs slightly from physical hardware fragmentation)
~Physical disk fragmentation is likely what comes to mind when fragmentation is first discussed. Physical fragmentation is a side effect of how hard drives and Windows work. It is common knowledge that regular disk defragmentation is required to achieve optimal performance from your PC. Windows even includes a basic defragmentation utility. Physical fragmentation slows down your PC because reading data is interrupted by head seek delay. Windows fits files into free space, often breaking the file into segments stored apart from one another. A hard drive’s head relocates to read each individual segment. As it moves to each segment the head ‘seeks’ - often at a cost of 3-4 times the time it takes to read the segment itself. Physical fragmentation primarily affects desktop or laptop PCs containing one hard drive. The single drive must sequentially gather data – so on a fragmented disk it seeks, reads, seeks, reads - these 4 operations are performed one after another. Defragmented, the operation ends up as seek, read, read. We reduce the total cost of 24ms to 15ms in our simple example. Physical defragmentation products such as Windows defrag, Power Defrag™, Page Defrag™ (another Microsoft tool), or the granddaddy of them all, Diskeeper 2011™ work very well when repairing segmented files. Diskeeper’s technology is licensed to Microsoft as the defragmentation tool internal to Windows. In fact, Diskeeper’s latest innovations bring physical defragmentation capabilities to a completely new level. All of these products reorder the data on your disk, consolidating files into fewer segments to minimize “head seeks” – providing faster boot times, quicker file reads, and a more responsive system overall.