How often do you defragment?

Hello all, i'd like to know how many of you actually make it a point to defragment your drive as part of system maintenance and how often? Built in or other tools? Thanks.

With the built in XP defrag which is actually made by the Diskeeper Corporation, once a month, before updating my backup drive images and after deleting the contents of the prefetch folder and generally cleaning up the drive.

If you install Diskeeper 9 Professional you can leave it on Smart Scheduling and have it defrag seamlessly in the background, but I would advise you to have between 512 and 1024 MB of RAM.

Diskeeper 9, Professional version, has the advantage of incorporating Frag-Shield, unlike the Diskeeper 9 Home version, which is useful if the Master File Tables ever need to be adjusted.

Diskeeper 9 Professional version with Frag-Shield can be used on XP Professional or XP Home Edition.

[Moderator]

In Windows once a month. In linux never.

I do it once a month, But the longer you leave it the slower it will take.

i remember defragging a friends PC and it took about 2 hours!

R0SS

Game computer - every time a program/update is installed
Internet computer - After major changes have been made to the file system.

Thanks everyone for ur quick replies. I have myself experienced the performance improvement thru defrag ( the workstations and servers at work are defragged using an automatic tool) and it seems to be doing a great job.
On my home PC i run the XP tool and am considering shifting to the automatic one..for the very features that Mac mentioned. I find the system loaded with crap even after just sessions of browsing and the system seems to slow down so fast.
I'd been curious to know the defrag schedules that everyone else follows and its cool that u all defrag regualrly!

[Moderator]

I find the system loaded with crap even after just sessions of browsing and the system seems to slow down so fast.

That's a worry  

[Moderator]

I have DisKeeper and it is scheduled to do it weekly at 4 A.M.

The only thing you should never defrag are image files.
They Hate That.

patio.  

Why not?

Image files are just binary code spreadout over many a cluster.

Wow, I've yet to defrag my 7 month old system and I see no slow-down in performance.

In the past 15 years I've probably defragged two, maybe three times. Guess I'll have to try it out one of these days.  

RayG

[Moderator]

As I understand it a HD is made up of zillions of little elements that can be either magnetised or demagnetised thus forming the 1s & 0s that a computer uses to store/delete/overwrite information.

I read that over time these little elements can loose their magnetism and consequently the information can be corrupted.

In effect defrag reads each element & rewrites it, resulting in a freshly magnetised or demagnetised element.

That all sort of sounds feasible but I can't say I know it from 1st hand experience.

If that's how it works then defragging is more that just shuffling things around.

Any thoughts?

I've always heard the conventional wisdom that frequent defrags are a necessity, but I've never personally seen a noticeable increase in performance from doing one.

Hi again everyone, this is a great forum, thanks for all ur views. I was readin up some papers on defrag on the net and from what i understand, if the drive is badly fragmented, not defragging it could lead to more wear and tear of the HDD than that caused by defrags. i guess there cant be a consensus on how often as it wud depend on how fragmented ur drive gets, your usage etc.
I believe the third party tools run on the system daily but just defrag when needed. The daily defrag paper has kinda convinced me to spend a little time on this maintenance task, why not?

More important than the actual defrag itself is to clean out all the junk files. I run CCLeaner and EmpTemp before I shut the computer down.

Cleaning out all of the junk means less to defrag.

Mac, yes ofcourse, disk cleanup before the defrag, definitely.
I use CCleaner as well, nice utility.