When to defragment hard disk?
If you’re noticing the hard drive struggling to read data fast enough, then it may be worth it. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother. De-fragmenting your hard drive when it’s not really needed will only increase the wear on your hard drive and reduce its working life for no good reason. The other side of the coin is that if your disk is fragmented too much the hard disk will have to work harder – again, reducing it’s life (not to mention reducing performance). For heavy users, de-fragmentation may be needed as frequently as once a month. It really depends on how how much you use your computer, and what you use it for. However, I wouldn’t let the hard disk get fragmented any more than 40% – beyond this point and you’re going to begin struggling and it’s not good for the drive. The de-fragmentation utility included in Windows should be fine for most users. If you’re looking for a heavier de-fragmentation, then try something like Defraggler;
Computers files are not always stored in a “linear” fashion, meaning, the OS will put different pieces of a file in whatever space is available, which can lead to a single file being broken up into many hundreds of parts, all scattered about in different places on the disk. In order for this file to be “read”, the drive head must rapidly jump back and forth while the disc is spinning. Since the disc can spin past the head much faster than the head can move around, the disc must slow down to accommodate all this “jumping.” This is why fragmented files can cause a slowdown. “Defragging” was invented to help speed up data transmission rates by reducing the amount of searching the drive head had to do to find all the pieces of a file. Basically it takes all those little scattered pieces and re-writes them back on to the disc in a nice orderly fashion, so now when the drive head goes to read the file, it only has to move to the single location and stay there until the data has been read. At
