Diskeeper 12

There are extreme cases where it can seem to be helpful, but with all of the other mechanisms within a modern OS for avoiding I/O latency it's difficult to pin point how much it helps. Just reading over the disk has a huge affect because of the filesystem caching and read-ahead.

No, your pagefile doesn't get "clogged" and keeping data files in order means nothing to your software.

 

Don't you think, if you have a lot of fragmented files and read/write heads would be flying- looking to those file fragments all over the HDD platters...wouldn't it wear out faster and cause HDD failure?

 

It won't significantly reduce drive life. They're made to work. Fragmentation isn't the big problems companies want you to think. There's edge and extreme cases of fragmentation where a defrag will definitely help, and make a noticeable difference, but in most cases it won't do anything. Vista started using a weekly defrag by default, and I think that's a reasonable approach. Monthly might have been better, but whatever.

SSDs shouldn't be defragged at all due to the way they operate. That'll likely /reduce/ performance, and will definitely reduce their lifespan.

 

Given the MTBF of drives, no. There are mechanical defects that surface from time to time, but most of the time usage doesn't have an appreciable affect on drive life. You either get a drive that lasts out out to the MBTF or beyond or one that dies very quickly.

Now, I wouldn't rule out some of the "green" drives as lowering their MTBF significantly because of the frequent spin up/down cycles in an attempt to save a few joules of energy but I can't say much because I haven't paid much attention and have always bought non-green drives because of the bitching Iv'e seen.

 

If you want the autodefrag (which really isn't necessary) feature of Disk Keeper IOBit's Smart Defrag does that.

However, you're likely to not need to defrag more often than once a week unless you are constantly installing and uninstalling programs.

Additionally many defragmentation programs give you the option to skip files of a certain size.

Microsoft's own internal testing indicates that defragmenting files larger than about 60 megabytes doesn't really produce any gains because over a certain size the read/write heads on a mechanical drive will be fast enough to read a file at a similar speed if it is fragmented or contiguous.

This also accounts for why the Windows defragmenter will report almost no fragmentation while a 3rd party defragger will report more heavy fragmentation.

I just use Auslogics disk defrag about once a week with the program set to ignore files over 50 megs in size.