Android said:
LOL
But hey if you think 'pointlessly' defragging 100Gb's every week or 2 aint gonna have a significant effect on MTBF then 'I'll just laugh at you''
If I can make an observation - you seem to be implying that all defragging is useless/bad, but really this is not such a white/black question IMO - you're over simplifying the situation if you argue like that. (If that's not what you're arguing then I apologise in advance for misreading you.)
To elaborate: If the defrag program you use does indeed pointlessly move hundreds of gigs of data around on
every defrag (even if it's already defragged)
and if you ran this
very frequently, then I'd agree that this would be putting an unneccesary strain on the moving mechanical parts of the drive.
However, arguing like that is somewhat of a strawman argument, as
no proper self-respecting defrag program today works like this. A Good defragger will typically focus its attention on the areas/files that are fragmented and leave alone the parts that are already fine, obviously with such an approach the drive will only really work hard while the drive is badly fragmented in the initial defragmentation. Later runs will be less work and will keep the drive tidy, meaning that the drive will thus work less hard during actual use than it would've had it not been defragged at all.
Therefore, on balance, particularly in a setting where the use the drive is put to tends to cause fragmentation (working with very large filesystems with lots of little files that get rewritten often for example or lots of software is installed and uninstalled), the drive will work less hard during it's life if it's kept in a fairly defragmented state, than if it's not defragged at all, all IMHO of course. So the answer IMO really is: "whether defragging is harmful to a disk, depends with what you defrag and how often, and to what use the drive is normally put."
