A lot of people I’ve heard insisting that defragmenting my hard drive is something I should do fairly regularly, claiming that it will give me increased speed or performance or something. The thing is, I’ve got two computers and I’ve done this several times to both of them over the last few years. Never have I noticed any difference whatsoever when I use the computer. Am I alone here, or do other people really see the big difference in performance after defragmenting?
I’ve only seen it make a difference computers I’ve “cleaned” for folks. Generally the computers were not maintained.
I think if you don’t defrag often enough you can get problems. But, before and after regular defragging prob’ly not so much.
Also I think it was a bigger issue w/ Win9x than w/ XP
I’ve had this PC for two years now, and defragmented for the first time last weekend, more out of curiosity than anything else. So far it seems like the same old PC to me, I haven’t noticed any difference. How often is it recommended to actually do this?
Just de-fragged mine last week. Before that: September. It was heavily fragmented, according to the statistics. Took right at an hour to do all its tricks. I notice no difference.
Another thing: I update the Norton Anti-Virus automatically and it gets new definitions every week (sometimes more often). I run a scan as soon as I notice the new defs are in place. There’s another hour. Yet to catch ONE virus!
The only thing that appreciably increased performance on mine was to add 16 Meg of memory. That really helped.
Are we talking workstations or servers? Defragmentation used to benefit FAT32-based workstations, but I’ve never seen any benefit from defragmenting NTFS-based workstations. IIRC NTFS is somewhat resilient to fragmentation - 3 extents or less and you don’t see a difference. I have, however, seen noticable (but not quantified at the time) improvement after a server RAID 5 was defragmented. Normally, you would not expect this with such a RAID, but NTFS tends to fragment heavily when the drive gets full, a perennial problem hereabouts, and we have very many hefty files.
Defragmentation is also dangerous: if there’s a power blip at the wrong moment or a software crash or something, then you can potentially kiss goodbye to all your files - or worse, have a file which is apparently ok until you come to access it.
The very best way of defragmenting a drive is to copy everything from that drive to another drive.
Basically, if your home PC uses NTFS, don’t bother with defragmentation.
This is Microsoft’s #1 answer to performance issues: first try adding more memory.
thanks…it was more of an experiment, out of idle curiosity. I’ve heard it said by so many people that defragmenting would make such a big difference. I thought it was just me…the machine isn’t really having a performance problem, I was just curious what the big deal was.
When i’m just doing normal stuff (word processing, web browsing, etc.) then it generally seems that defragging isn’t necessary.
But i sometimes do large batch processing of images in Photoshop, and also video editing and encoding to make DVDs from archive.org movies. Working with really big files like this (upwards of 2-3Gb), and moving a lot of stuff around to create new files, can cause quite a bit of fragmentation, and i usually notice some improvements if i defragment the drive.
There’s your major performance bottleneck. Norton is a prodigious memory hog, and will slow down your computer a lot more than a moderately fragmented hard drive. I recommendAVG 7.1 Free Edition; a much smaller memory footprint, and they won’t nick you for $40 a year either.
Thanks for the recommendation. My Norton year is up in November. I hope I can remember this product by then. I won’t know what to do without Norton. 
The benefits are two-fold:
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Performance. The drive head won’t have to go all over the place in order to retrieve data, hence faster performance. Will you notice this performance boost? Depends on 1. What you are doing (gaming, handling large files, surfing the net) and 2. how fragmented your drive was to begin with.
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Wear and tear on your drive. The more the drive head has to run around, the more work it has to do, the shorter the lifespan of your drive will be.
I defrag about twice a month, usually do it when I’m at work.
I can say that yes, I definitely saw improvement back in the late 80s-early 90s to defragging the hard drive. This was back in the era of the 60-100 MB hard drives on my machines.
Now, with multi-gigabyte dard drives, I have not really notcied any diff, personally. The beast always seems to find room to store my files contiguously.
YMMV, of course, and it certainly depends on a lot of factors.
I second this. Norton–especially the full suite–is an inexcusable performance drain. I switched from Norton/McAfee to AVG and haven’t looked back since.
A whole 16 megs? WooHoooo! 
I third this. Norton is a absolutely phenomenal resource hog. It’s almost as bad as the malware it combats. It’s so far from where the Norton Utilities started out many years ago as a nimble suite of disk utilities.
Last year, my company spent quite a bit of time trying to demonstrate the benefits of defragmentation to the average PC user. We found two things:
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For the sorts of things we were doing (and I don’t have all the details, but I don’t think there were any games or multimedia editing involved), there was no appreciable difference between 50% fragmentation and 0% except that software loaded into RAM more quickly. Once it’s in RAM, drive fragmentation just doesn’t matter.
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The defrag utility that’s native to Windows is the only one that will ever defragment a 50% fragmented drive in two hours. All the others take 24+. We suspect that the Windows utility is not entirely honest.
Okay. How much should I add? What’s a reasonable amount of memory?
512 to 1 gig for XP and OSX (Mac).
it is a function of your OS. Older OS’es were tuned for smaller memory spaces. The newest OSes are tuned for large memory spaces.
The best thing you can do is get as close to 512 as you can afford. More than that is better, but 90% of the time, 512 will be enough.
Thanks! No wonder I keep getting messages that my “virtual memory” is low.
When Apple OSX first came out Macheads made a big deal that OSX uses automatic defragging and XP didn’t. Don’t know whether that was true then, but it certainly isn’t now. Both OSes defrag the HD constantly. In any event what that mostly showed is that at levels less than 98% full, defragging doesn’t measurably help. After all, 2% of 100gig is still quite a large file. The computer doesn’t have much trouble locating free space to write files. The driver doesn’t necessarily write the file contiguously even if it can. The algorithms are very smart these days and know how much file to write at once. Consider that all HDs buffer data through a high-speed (even for RAM) buffer. The algorithm knows how much data the buffer can hold and how long it takes to fill then purge the buffer-it may leave space between sections of the file to account for the time it takes to empty the buffer. That way it won’t have to wait an entire rotation to continue reading the file like it will after the disk has been defragged.
The short answer: don’t bother defragging your disk (assuming a modern OS) unless the disk is 99% full. In that case, don’t bother defragging the disk-go through and purge some of that junk off your disk. Defragging is, in the vast majority of cases, obsolete. Of course there will always be the exception. If you are running a RAID5 disk array storing movie files, then I can imagine the need to occasionally clean up. For the rest of us, relax.