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Does Defragmenting Stress the Hard Drive?

defragmenting stress
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Does Defragmenting Stress the Hard Drive?

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Executive Software® releases new technical paper showing that defragmenting does not stress the hard drive. Overworking the drive is a valid and logical concern, and it seems reasonable that defragmenting would cause a lot of disk activity. However, that is not the case. Disk wear is usually greater on a non-defragmented drive than on a drive that is defragmented regularly. According to Lance Jensen, Executive Software Technical Support Representative, “Reading a file from the disk requires at least one disk access for each fragment. A contiguous file has only one “fragment”, so it usually requires only one disk access. When you defragment for the first time, the defragmenter is going to access and move a great many fragmented files, probably the majority of the files on the drive. But if you do not defragment, then just reading those fragmented files will require the same amount of disk access. In fact, every time you read a fragmented file, the computer will be doing as much disk acc

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