Unfortunately there is another fly to throw into the defrag soup. The defrag
software performs the defrag according to what the drive electronics
reports. Unfortunately, modern drives tell fibs to the system. The reported
sectors are not the actual physical geometry of the drive. Therefore, your
defrag software is defragging not necessarily according to the actual
physical (read head movement) layout of the drive.

Regarding wear and tear, you are probably right. An occasional defrag could
reduce overall wear, but doing a defrag every week will likely cause a lot
more wear than it saves.

One last item. If you are running XP or another version of NT with NTFS,
defrag may not be all that effective because NTFS has its own disk
optimization routines. Rather than just defragging, it does make some sense
to redistribute the files according to usage. Norton SpeedDisk does this
(although it is pitifully slow), and I believe that Diskkeeper does so as
well.

Peter
-----------------------------------------------
The NoSpin Group
[log in to unmask]


> -----Original Message-----
> May I add another cent or so to this? (The jackpot is accumulating).
>
> Peter says, rightly, that excess defragging imposes extra
> wear and tear on the hard drive. Quite so.  I can't say I've
> ever noticed any real-world improvement after defragging,
> even when fragmentation has been up to 5%. The usual
> recommendation is to defrag after about 3-4% fragmented. You
> could probably let it go much more than that before things
> start to slow down. Maybe it depends on the size and amount
> of free space.

                Curious about the people moderating your
                   messages? Visit our staff web site:
                    http://freepctech.com/staff.shtml