Defrag

[antiguru]

Is it necessary to defrag a drive these days? No-one ever seems to mention it anymore (for example I've never worked anywhere that asks me to do it �although I realise that work pc's use a network to store data) although I religiously do it every few months with no discernable difference.

Has it been superseded by advances in hard drive design?

[Alienuk]

Yes it helps your computer run faster still but it is not 100% necessary. It does help though because when you run your programs it can find them easier.

[Ethel]

I defrag once a month - I find it helps keep things run smoothly.

[fo3nix]

For most people, you don't need to do it any more. Many still do though, either because they've been told it helps from someone else, or from doing it years ago.

Most popular modern operating systems (Windows XP and above, Mac OS X, some GNU/Linux distributions) do the defrag process in the background when the hard drive is idle for short moments of time.

However, these processes only do the smaller files on your disk. Since most files are small (i.e., less than about 30MB or so), it works quite well.

They don't do the same sort of thing for very large files. So, if you're someone who uses large files a lot, such as video editing, then you may want to defrag once every few weeks or month or so.

[RATTER15]

I try to do mine about once a month, it does help!! I download a lot of music and after reorganising my music files I find my PC really needs defragmenting.

[antiguru]

Thanks everyone. I'll carry on defragging. It certainly doesn't seem to do any harm.

[pug100]

As stated earlier video editing is what causes a lot of fragmentation due to the large size of the video data files. On my system I had used around 11Gb of drive space and almost no fragmentation before getting into editing. Now I've used 45 Gb of space and have 50 % fragmentation. Defragging lots of data takes a lot of time, so if you can do it overnight.
If you do a lot of video work it's best if you use a separate hard drive for your video files, as defragging the video files can sometimes upset the editing software and make your videos unplayable. Large USB drives are really cheap these days, I see Maplin are selling a 300Gb one for �50.