Defragging the hard disk

[Alexandoy]

With the big hard disks now, is there a need to defrag it? I have been advised by a friend to defrag the system disk of the laptop that is 500 GB. I have been using it for 3 months and it made me think why the need to defrag. It looks it is too early to do that since the laptop is not much used for storing files. Any thoughts on the issue of defragging the system hard disk?

 

[PGen98]

Platter-based disks can still be defragged and do benefit from a good defrag every now and then, but don't defrag SSDs!

 

[Nocturnal Thinker]

If you defrag your laptop with such 500 Gygabytes, it will take time if you have used your laptop several years. However defraging your HD has to be done when the laptop becomes insufficient in its job due to large files, due to clogging of the cycle bin of deleted files in . Thus, they should be cleaned.

You also need to defrag your laptop when there's always a power outage. When the computer wasn't properly shut down. That particular scenario of maintaining the integrity of the hard disk. So that is the very rationale of degfraging whether it is big or small gig.

 

[apathy]

I believe the way Windows' NTFS works is it places files on each succeeding block, meaning that when you modify a file or its file size increases the amount it's increased by needs to be split off and stored somewhere else. This is the reason why defragging is necessary. With this in mind, if a 500GB drive is being used often I think I'd defrag it every 6 months or so. If it's not being used to store many files, I think you could probably do it once a year. Maybe after major Windows updates would be a good idea, though I'm unsure how frequent they are these days.

 

[Nabix]

I can't even tell you the last time a did a defrag. I've been fortunate enough to be able to use an SSD since they become available.

 

[sliara]

Well I think that you must defragment your hard drive when it becomes full of files, but if not that full then you should just leave it alone. The files just need to be stacked in order anyway.

 

[Hova]

My pc does it automatically.

 

[Alexander]

There is no harm if you choose to schedule a defrag once a week automatically. Although these sorts of maintenance tasks need to be done when the HD has insufficient storage and cannot store any additional information. Hope this helps.