What does defragmenting hard drive do

Leo, is it safe to defrag an encrypted portable hard drive? If it is safe, should the drive be un-encrypted first — before starting the defrag process? Great advice, but.. It is a bad habit to leave your computer on overnight.

Not only does it harm the environment by unnecessarily draining electricity, you harm the computer by having it constantly powered on. Give your computer a break, and save yourself some money. Turn it OFF when you are not using it. Hi Leo Good article and mostly good posts. But instead of putting my 2 cents worth in Europe now too!!

I would like to ask one question which has intrigued me for some time now, as you have dealt more or less with this question before. How can defragging, even once a week wear the HDD out more than the Head flying round like a maniac every time the computer is run.

I like to chop videos up and splice parts together to see what I can make and that scatters parts of files all over. So I disabled it and installed Auslogics Disk Defrag, which does the same job that the Win 7 defragger does in about 3 minutes. I provide tech support to a dozen families, and do the same on their computers. In short, I recommend against using the Win 7 defragger and instead using the Auslogics product, which is free. Wow, OK, defragging… I can finally explain it to easirer my family and freinds, Thanks again for the continuing pearls of wisdom Leo!!!

Every user will be different, and most users will differ from time to time. When using this I just click Analise first. If the figures are low I do not defrag and therefore reduce HDD wear and tear. If the figures are high I do defrag and paradoxically also reduce HDD wear and tear.

Whole thing just takes a little practice. When that done try out the advanced options. These to me speed up the comp. Luck All!!! Use auslogics on demand defragger, no schedules for me. I never practiced the idea of leaving anything on when I am not using it and my hard drive is just fine for now.

While theoretically it should be possible by shuffling individual sectors around, most tools require enough free space to contain at least the largest file being defragmented. Dom I believe when Leo said shuffling sectors around was referring to shuffling the contents of those sectors. Not an error, just another way of looking at it.

If Windows 7 runs defragging automatically once a week, does that mean that if you buy a solid state hard drive you should turn the automatic defragmenting off, if you can?

But I cannot analyze it or defrag it. Is there a reason for that happening? Should I be able to defrag the C drive? And why does it keep increasing like that? However, when I click on the C Drive, even to analyze it, nothing at all happens.

The same for when I try to defrag it. And then the next time I look at that window, I see the percentage has usually risen by a couple points on the C drive. Should I be able to defrag the hard drive? I wonder about the process of disk fragmentation. I am constantly in need to defragment a disk. It seems a scam? I defragmented my disk, did some work, and , files were immediately fragmented.

How are files written? It seems that it is not done in any coherent, intelligent way. Is it a Windows problem? Do ext3 disks suffer this problem? What does defragging do and is it something I need to do to my computer? How often?

Dear Defragging, "Defrag" is short for "defragment," which is a maintenance task required by your hard drives. Most hard drives have spinning platters, with data stored in different places around that platter.

When your computer writes data to your drive, it does so in "blocks" that are ordered sequentially from one side of the drive's platter to the other. Fragmentation happens when those files get split between blocks that are far away from each other.

The hard drive then takes longer to read that file because the read head has to "visit" multiple spots on the platter. Defragmentation puts those blocks back in sequential order, so your drive head doesn't have to run around the entire platter to read a single file.

Image by XZise. Relax and be free from anxiety Take back good sleep and help alleviate pain. There is nothing a user can do to stop this. However, there is not a specific number of times files can be written to the hard drive before the whole thing stops working. Defragmenting only does not put extra wear and tear on your hard drive, but because of its performance boosting effects; it will actually make your hard drive perform better.

The same can be said for cleaning up old files. By getting rid of old files and defragmenting the files you actually use, you help keep your files compact and easy for your hard drive to access. While it is difficult to judge if defragmenting and cleaning your hard drive actually helps it last longer, they do make it so you can keep effectively using your hard drive for a longer period of time.

Defragmenting and cleaning old files from your hard drive regularly will help extend the usable lifespan of your hard drive. A hard drive that does not go through this kind of maintenance regularly may still technically be usable and mechanically healthy , but it will not be nearly as enjoyable or easy to use as a hard drive taken care of.

If you need a quote and timing is critical, Record Nations will get you connected to an expert quickly. When a computer saves a file to a hard drive, it uses whatever space is available -- if there is not enough consecutive free space to hold the file as a whole, the hard drive splits the file into multiple parts and store those parts in available open spaces.

A non-contiguous file is called a fragmented file. If your computer's running slower than normal, you might be able to speed things back up by defragmenting that hard drive.

Defragmenting is beneficial for HDDs because it brings files together instead of scattering them so that the device's read-write head doesn't have to move around as much when accessing files.

Two things affect how quickly a hard drive recalls data: seek time and read speed which relate to the time it takes to move the controller arm to the data location and how long it takes to read the data. Defragmenting improves load times by reducing how frequently the hard drive has to seek data. Defragmenting a SSD will likely not improve performance and cause the drive to wear out faster.