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Defragging/Formating bad for drive?

F

Furystrike

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 6, 2004
Messages
1,535
hey guys,

Me and some friends were just discussing defragging and formatting. I've always thought that it only made things better to defrag/reformat but we have one opinion saying that you can only defrag/format so many times before the drive goes bad. Any comments on this?
 
defragging and reformatting are two completely different things. Defragging moves files and pieces fragments of files together, whereas formatting completely erases all information on a drive. Thereoretically, doing either of these enough times will destroy the drive, because it will eventually wear it out. But that is the case for anything you do to the drive.
 
Defragging should only be done once a month give or take depending on usage of the pc, I'm not sure of the problems but I'm guessing it would just start to wear out the drive.
 
Not what I was hopin' to hear, but thanks for the truth guys =) I just have some pretty old hard drives around that are still workin' well which made me think otherwise.
 
Think of defragging as just writting/rewriting a bunch of data on the drive, it's no worse than just "heavy" data moving. Formatting isn't intensive, actually all it does is marks the drive as empty and sets up a table of contents for the drive, it doesn't actually erase data, and thus isn't very harsh on the drive.

Neither one will "hurt" a drive per se, much more than regular usage, a hard drive being a mechanical item it will take so much wear and tear before it starts to go bad.
 
Defragging helps performance significantly when your drive is heavily fragmented from moving
many large files. It can really slow things down when you get above 40-50% fragmentation.
That has been my experience anyway.
 
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