Is 'defragging' your hard drive as important as it once was?

Today's hard drives are 10+ times faster than the drives of old — is defragging really still worth the bother?




There's much more to defragging than simply improving hard drive performance.

Before we dive in, let's run through a 60-second defragging refresher.

Windows normally stores the files on a hard drive in a series of blocks. When a drive is new or well-ordered, each file's blocks can be written to the drive more or less sequentially. But over time, holes open in that orderly sequence as files are changed or deleted; they are then filled with bits of data from other files. Eventually, a file's blocks may end up scattered all over the disk.

When a file's blocks aren't contiguous, the drive heads have to seek out the blocks, physically navigating to each block's location. Each seek adds to the time it takes to read or retrieve the entire file.

Defragging corrects this by moving data blocks back to contiguous, sequential series — the system can again access the files smoothly and quickly, with little or no extra head seeks.

The seek times of today's hard drives are over 10 times faster than those we used in the 'old' days. So the benefit of reducing seek times is an order of magnitude less. You probably won't notice any difference accessing a given file, whether the drive is defragged or not.

But the aggregate seek times still matter. We now use our drives far more intensely than we used to. (My first hard drive held 20 megabytes of data; nowadays, I take individual photos larger than that.) So the total number of seeks our hard drives perform today has increased by an order of magnitude.

Speed aside, there other benefits from defragging. For example, it improves your odds of recovering a deleted file, folder, or partition; it reduces overall wear and tear on the drive heads; and it helps minimize noise and heat during normal operations.

Initial disk defragmentation can take hours. But after that, it takes just a couple of minutes if you run the process every day. Because you can run defragging as an unattended process in all current versions of Windows — no third-party tools needed — one might ask: why would you not defrag?


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