How often do you defrag?

[Harrie]

I saw a post on another board, and bunches of folks said that doing it too often is actually harmful! I do it about once a week, or, sometimes I go into lapses and do it about once a month.....how about you, and what's your opinion about this "harmful" business?

[Mr1drful]

about once every 2 weeks for me is normal but I download lots of movies and programs and burn them to CD. after I burn and delete the files from the harddrive , I always run scandisk and defrag so sometimes it's as often as every 2 or 3 days.

never heard that defragging too often is harmful . all it does is put your files back in order to optimize performance. can't see any negative aspects to that unless you have a packard-bell. they don't like ANYTHING optimized or even running right (LOL

[MishY]

Once every couple of weeks

[enat66]

2 a year maybe if i am lucky cause it takes abnout 3 hours for me.

[Pretender]

i scan and defrag daily. only takes a couple minutes this way.

[Alfons]

I defrag on the average of once a month on most of my computers, but I seldom run Scandisk (unless forced to do so by the OS) because I've seen some of Scandisk's handiwork first hand several times - once on my own computer. It can literally destroy your directories under some circumstances, like having too little space left on the C drive for example.

I takes a long time to find all the data that you want saved when Scandisk has changed the directory names to DIRNNNNN where N=an octal number starting at 00001.

I prefer to use other tools to check on my drive's integrity.

[zipulrich]

I use Diskeeper v.7, set to defrag weekly. Never had a problem.

The XP box gets defragged about every 2-3 weeks. No probs there, either!

[AnnMarie]

About once a month. Having had a hard drive literally fry on me a few years ago because I ignored what scandisk was telling me, I now always run scandisk first.

[Jethro]

Once in a blue moon... l work for a company aligned with MS and IBM, and must say l haven't heard anything about defrag harming a hard drive in all the reams of email l receive each day.

[The Dude]

Originally Posted by MishY

Once every couple of weeks

The last time I defragged it said I hadnt defragged in 43 days..... I dont know where the days go!!

I usually try to do it every week or sooner (Every few days)

The opening post said doing it too much can cause problems,why is that??

I know I read somewhere the WinME defrag is faster so I tried that (Im on 98se) and it IS faster but it deosnt do as good a job i noticed so I put my 98se defrag back on.....