Quote:
Originally Posted by Por_sha911
I wouldn't defrag too often. Its not needed and you are wearing out your HD. I would think once every 1-3 months should be fine.
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This concerned me, so I looked around:
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"does defragging cause hdd wear?"
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does defragging cause hdd wear? - Hard Drives - Storage
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Heat is typically the #1 thing that causes mechanical things to fail.
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I think to answer this question, you have to look at the various mechanisms that can cause a hard drive to fail.
1. High temperatures that result in lowered magnetic properties, to the point where the surface of the platter can't store bits reliably anymore.
2. Internal contamination that either abrades the heads, scratches the platter surface, or otherwise causes interference between the heads and the platter surfaces. The internal contamination can result from flaking of the platter magnetic surface, seal failure and entry of contaminants from outside, or some other broken piece inside the drive.
3. Motor failure, such that the platters won't spin or are unable to maintain the proper RPM.
4. Bearing failure, such that the platters won't spin.
5. Head crash, where the head and platter touch while the platter is rotating, resulting in head abrasion, platter scratch, and internal contamination.
6. Voice coil failure, such that the head arm can't move.
7. Electronics failure, resulting in inability to read/write through the head, inability to send current to the voice coil to move the head, or inability to control the spin motor.
8. Mechanical damage from dropping, etc. that cracks or breaks a platter, causes misalignment of the heads/head arm, binds the platters or head arm, etc.
9. Complete erasure of the platters, including the servo tracks, resulting in inability to position the heads.
Repeated and excessive reads/writes to the hard drives place stress on some of the components inside the hard drive. Mainly, continuous read/writes cause elevated temperatures due to the current that's constantly being send to the voice coil to move the heads. They also cause continuous mechanical stress cycles on the head arm. After several million cycles, you elevate the risk of metal fatigue cracking, but this generally requires that a preexisting flaw in the head arm existed during manufacturing.
Bearing wear from continuous operation is another concern, although the fluid dynamic bearings used in modern hard drives have so little wear under operation.
For the most part, I'd say that overall mechanical wear on the hard drive components will eventually cause it to fail at some point, but in all likelihood there will be some other event that occurs that causes the hard drive to fail long before these mechanical stresses have a chance to cause a failure.
A power surge that fries the electronics (or erases a critical piece of servo information), a large temperature cycle that destroys the magnetic properties of a few sectors, a manufacturing defect in the platters that causes flaking and internal contamination -- these are the real-world reasons that cause a hard drive to come to its demise, not excessive seeks.
I don't see anything wrong with running defrag on a regular basis, nor running chkdsk. (Exception: If your file system is really messed up and you can't access your files, there is a chance that chkdsk can cause more damage than it repairs. Most professional data recovery experts will tell you that chkdsk will generally make the job harder, not easier when it comes to data recovery).
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If you're keeping it cool, it should last a long time provided it's a quality product. A lot of drives can fail just simply because of poor manufacturing processes or quality of parts / handling of it etc.
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Performing defrags / chkdsk isn't going to do anything that wasn't about to occur anyway. But they are probably blamed because any mechanical weakness will show up under stress and these procedures are a bit stressful... but it doesn't mean they should be blamed for the failure.