Does Defragmenting Shorten HDDs Life? Are Files Deleted?

Defragmenting your hard drive is like having a group of people who go to your office over the weekend to rearrange each file that is out of place in consolidated and organize files again. This way, when you arrive on Monday morning, everything will be in its place.

Then when you need a certain file, all you need do is consult the index, take the file and use it. No need to twist around the office looking for a particular document that was lost.

On the computer, the process is similar. Defragmenting organizes files so that the system knows exactly where each of them greatly increase access speed.

But doing it very often can wear this piece of hardware?

If you are using a normal hard disk, NO. In fact the process may even increase the life of the hard disk, since the HD’s are disks that contain the files physically. Thus in order to open, read heads should be directed to the position of the item and more fragmentation, more readers will have to move.

A normal hard drive has a seek time of about 16 ms. If a file is fragmented into 20 parts, the read heads will take approximately 320 ms to effectively carry all parts of the document.

And, Defragmenting has nothing to do with cleaning up of files so none of your data is lost or no file is deleted.

Do not Defragment SSD? Why?

Machines with Solid State Drives (SSD acronym in English) are increasingly present in the market. Because it uses a different technology common hard drives (flash memory in Logar magnetic disk), this type of device does not need to be defragmented ever. They work exceptionally random access operations and therefore the organization of data is not really useful for SSD’s.

With respect to the recording limit, an SSD has a life expectancy of about 10,000 read/write cycles before it becomes unusable. That is, a frequent defragmentation, as well as bring no benefits to this type of disc, so you better save time by avoiding it.

Operating systems had to adapt to this new technology. For Windows 7, it is sufficiently “smart” and automatically disable the feature when identifying the disks and partitions as SSD’s.