HDD Defrag

[Vavetti]

How important is it to defrag your hard drive?

I defrag my hard drive about every month, how often is it suggested?

[Samfisher]

Every month sounds about right.  But never for SSDs.

[TheRunningOtaku]

How important is it to defrag your hard drive?

I defrag my hard drive about every month, how often is it suggested?

I used to defrag every week - if you schedule it to 2am once a week, it shouldn't shorten the life of your drive by much (it'll check and not do anything if it's not fragged up) and you don't need to think about it.

 

EDIT: Used to because I got an SSD in a laptop and you shouldn't defrag SSDs

[Vavetti]

I used to defrag every week - if you schedule it to 2am once a week, it shouldn't shorten the life of your drive by much (it'll check and not do anything if it's not fragged up) and you don't need to think about it.

 

EDIT: Used to because I got an SSD in a laptop and you shouldn't defrag SSDs

ok I'll schedule it weekly, but why is it that ssd's shouldn't be defragged?

[TheRunningOtaku]

ok I'll schedule it weekly, but why is it that ssd's shouldn't be defragged?

SSDs store their data on many NAND flash chips - kinda like RAID0 for speed. 

The computer will see this as fragmentation, so it'll try to sort the files into its seperate NAND chip, but the SSD doesn't like that and it'll fight, there'll be problems. 

[DirkW]

ok I'll schedule it weekly, but why is it that ssd's shouldn't be defragged?

 

Defrag causes lots of write operations. SSDs have a limit on how many writes can be done to them, before they eventually will stop working (nothing to be concerned about in normal use, BTW). Also defrag on HDDs is done, so that the read/write head doesn't have to jump all over the place, when files are being loaded (defrag reorganizes files, so they can be read linear). SSD on the other hand don't have any moving heads, it's just some memory chips. So defrag wouldn't really help all that much on performance, but can seriously reduce an SSD's lifetime.