Does defragmenting reduce the life of hard drive or can it damage the hard drive in some way?
The answer in theory is no. It’s easy to think the task of defragmenting could do damage or reduce the life of a hard drive because the act of putting fragmented files back together is going to give the drive’s mechanics a workout. Keep in mind though, this workout only lasts the duration of the defragmenting. Once your files become fragmented however, the work involved in reading or writing a file is many times more than if it were contiguous. With each newly fragmented file, the workload increases – every time the file is accessed. So in reality, the workout occurs more often the longer you let your files fragment. You’ll also notice that defragmenting itself takes more time the longer you wait between defragmenting tasks. So to spare your drive some workouts, defrag more often, like maybe once a week or so.
