Q&A How often I should Defrag?

[Question]

List of current issues

How often should I defrag?

Steps taken, but have been unsuccessful?

PerfectDisk

How often I should Defrag?

My DefragSoftware is Perfect Disk

Specs:
i7 4770k
GTX 1060 6GB
16GB DDR3 Memory
1x 60GB SSD DREVO X1 (Windows)
1x 500GB HDD WDBlack (Games)
1x 500GB external hard drive (Pictures - Videos - Etc)

 

[9724anon7537]

That guy clearly doesn't know what he's talking about, when he says that defragmenting "can cause harm to your computer." It won't.

One thing you can't accuse Carey Holzman is that he clearly doesn't know what he's talking about
Carey Holzman - Wikipedia

 

[roger_m]

One thing you can't accuse Carey Holzman is that he clearly doesn't know what he's talking about

I've never heard of him before. I've never seen any of videos in my many hours of watching YouTube. I can and will say someone doesn't know what they are talking about, when what they are saying is not true. Maybe his other videos are worth watching, but what he said in these two videos, in my experience, is simply not true.

 

[SumTingWong]

That guy clearly doesn't know what he's talking about, when he says that defragmenting "can cause harm to your computer." It won't. For the average user, just letting Windows defrag the hard drives weekly, rather than using third party software will be all that is needed. But, neither the Windows defragmenter or third party ones will cause any harm.

Regarding SSDs, it's safe, but also pointless, to defragment them. It's been proven that SSDs have such a long lifespan, that defragging them won't kill them.

Defragging the SSD will shorten the lifespan that I know of. Even SSD manufacturers suggest DON'T DEFRAG THE SDD. It is not safe to defrag the SDD if you want the drive to last longer than 5 years. SSD can last up to 2 decades with a good maintenance. I don't know why we have to discuss defragging SSD in 2018 and HDD over SSD in 2018.............Unless you are a console gamer, than you might want to go HDD over SDD. But if the HDD and SSD price and capacity are the same than A LOT of people will go SSD over HDD.

 

[9724anon7537]

I've never heard of him before. I've never seen any of videos in my many hours of watching YouTube. I can and will say someone doesn't know what they are talking about, when what they are saying is not true. Maybe his other videos are worth watching, but what he said in these two videos, in my experience, is simply not true.

It's not true for you and your experience, this doesn't make it objectively true. He did mention in other videos and live streams that the reason you don't need to defrag it's because windows does it automatically.
In the end, i'll take his vast experience over yours or anyone else's here or on any other forum, any day

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/5k7cdr

 

[roger_m]

Defragging SSD will shorten the lifespan that I know off. Even SSD manufacturers suggest DON'T DEFRAG THE SDD.

Anytime data is written to a SSD, it will shorten the lifespan. But testing has shown that SSDs have such a long lifespan, that defragging them will not have any significant effect on it and they still should last for many years.

 

[SumTingWong]

Anytime data is written to a SSD, it will shorten the lifespan. But testing has shown that SSDs have such a long lifespan, that defragging them will not have any significant effect on it and they still should last for many years.

Should I defrag my SSD? | PC Gamer

What about SSDs—do they benefit from defragmentation? The simple answer is no. The entire basis of fragmented data relies on the fact that your storage device uses moving parts to access data. Since SSDs have no moving parts, hence “Solid State”, there's no seek time or rotational latency. Instead, SSDs access flash memory (NAND) at much higher speeds, typically less than 50us—that's 50 microseconds, or compared to a typical hard drive with a 15ms average access time, about 300 times faster. But there's more to the story than just speed.

The good news is that any defragmentation program worth using should also detect the presence of an SSD and warn you not to defrag it. So save your time and do something more useful like playing games instead of defragging.

Whatever article and author you read, he or she is completely wrong about defrag the SSD. Windows 10 choose TRIM instead of DEFRAG when it detects the SSD in the system.

 

[roger_m]

Whatever article and author you read, he or she is completely wrong.

I have already said, it is pointless to defrag a SSD. My point is that if you were to defrag a SSD, you would not kill the drive. Over time, if you were to defragment a SSD a lot, it could reduce the life of the drive quite a bit (and the article you linked to states that), but from doing a single defrag, you won't be doing any harm. Unfortunately, many people have the belief that SSDs have a short lifespan and you need to do all you can minimise the amount of data written to the drive. But it's just not true. To quote the article:

a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo as an example is rated for 150TB of total writes, or the equivalent of writing to every block of the drive at least 300 times. With typical users writing less than 20GB per day on average, it would require more than 20 years to burn through 150TB of writes.

 

[SumTingWong]

I have already said, it is pointless to defrag a SSD. My point is that if you were to defrag a SSD, you would not kill the drive. Over time, if you were to defragment a SSD a lot, it could reduce the life of the drive quite a bit (and the article you linked to states that), but from doing a single defrag, you won't be doing any harm. Unfortunately, many people have the belief that SSDs have a short lifespan and you need to do all you can minimise the amount of data written to the drive. But it's just not true. To quote the article:

You said,

Regarding SSDs, it's safe, but also pointless, to defragment them. It's been proven that SSDs have such a long lifespan, that defragging them won't kill them.

No, it is not safe at all. Defragging the SSD will kill the SSD eventually. I rather have my SSD die because of the write cycles than defragging the SSD that will makes everyone wonder in the first place " Why the hell do you defrag the SSD?".

 

[roger_m]

It's not true for you and your experience, this doesn't make it objectively true.

Yes, but just because you trust the guy in the video, it does mean that everything he says is true either.

He did mention in other videos and live streams that the reason you don't need to defrag it's because windows does it automatically.

So in some videos, he says you should just let Windows do its automatic defrag and in others, he says the defragging "can cause harm to your computer." He really needs to make up his mind.

In the end, i'll take his vast experience over yours or anyone else's here or on any other forum, any day

That's up to you. I certainly don't claim to be an expert, but I have been using disk defrag software for nearly 30 years, so I do have a little bit of experience.

 

[roger_m]

No, it is not safe at all. Defragging the SSD will kill the SSD eventually.
I basically said that:

Over time, if you were to defragment a SSD a lot, it could reduce the life of the drive quite a bit (and the article you linked to states that)

Sure, defragging a drive will eventually kill it. But it will need a lot of defrags to reach that point.

 

[9724anon7537]

Yes, but just because you trust the guy in the video, it does mean that everything he says is true either.

Sure, but as i said between him and some random guy in a forum, i'll trust him.

So in some videos, he says you should just let Windows do its automatic defrag and in others, he says the defragging "can cause harm to your computer." He really needs to make up his mind.

By manually defrag and by using third-party tools, that's what he says in all of his videos, not in some as you claim.

That's up to you. I certainly don't claim to be an expert, but I have been using disk defrag software for nearly 30 years, so I do have a little bit of experience.

using disk defrag software for nearly 30 years it's not something to brag about.

 

[Digerati]

Defragging the SSD will shorten the lifespan that I know of. Even SSD manufacturers suggest DON'T DEFRAG THE SDD. It is not safe to defrag the SDD

Yes, Yes, but No.

Yes, it will shorted the lifespan of the SSD. But even modern budget SSDs can easily support writes of 50GB (or more) per day, 365 days per year for 5 years or more. So defragging a SSD will NOT shorten the lifespan of the SSD in any way you will ever notice, unless you do it many times per day, every day for many years.

Yes, manufacturers say don't defrag but that is because it is not needed due to the way data is stored on SSDs (see my mail sorting box image in post #104 above).

No, it is safe to defrag a SSD, just a waste of time.

I agree with Roger_M. While that blogger may know his stuff, he is wrong in what he said. I didn't bother to watch the second video because his first 15 second video was just wrong. If a computer is 20 years old or older, that means it was made in 1998 or before. XP came out in 2001 and even XP computer hard drives needed defragging. So did W98 and before. And those versions of Windows did NOT automatically defrag the drives. So he was wrong to advise against it.

Just because a "talking head" is popular, that does not mean what he or she says is always right.

 

[SumTingWong]

Yes, Yes, but No.

Yes, it will shorted the lifespan of the SSD. But even modern budget SSDs can easily support writes of 50GB (or more) per day, 365 days per year for 5 years or more. So defragging a SSD will NOT shorten the lifespan of the SSD in any way you will ever notice, unless you do it many times per day, every day for many years.

Yes, manufacturers say don't defrag but that is because it is not needed due to the way data is stored on SSDs (see my mail sorting box image in post #104 above).

No, it is safe to defrag a SSD, just a waste of time.

I agree with Roger_M. While that blogger may know his stuff, he is wrong in what he said. I didn't bother to watch the second video because his first 15 second video was just wrong. If a computer is 20 years old or older, that means it was made in 1998 or before. XP came out in 2001 and even XP computer hard drives needed defragging. So did W98 and before. And those versions of Windows did NOT automatically defrag the drives. So he was wrong to advise against it.

Just because a "talking head" is popular, that does not mean what he or she says is always right.

If defrag can kill a SSD than it is not safe at all. Short and long answer is NO DEFRAG ON SSD period. TRIM > Defrag on SSD.

 

[roger_m]

If defrag can kill a SSD than it is not safe at all.

By that logic, just writing to a SSD is not safe, as writing to a SSD will also kill it eventually. As I've already stated more than once, there's no need to defrag a SSD. So I'm certainly not suggesting that people do it.

By manually defrag and by using third-party tools, that's what he says in all of his videos, not in some as you claim.

He did not say that in the two short videos you linked to. As for his other videos, I've never watched any of them and don't plan to, if they're anything like those two.

using disk defrag software for nearly 30 years it's not something to brag about.

I wasn't bragging, I was just pointing out that you don't have to be some random YouTuber to have lots of experience with defragging.

 

[9724anon7537]

He did not say that in the two short videos you linked to. As for his other videos, I've never watched any of them and don't plan to, if they're anything like those two.

I wasn't bragging, I was just pointing out that you don't have to be some random YouTuber to have lots of experience with defragging.

Alright he didn't said that in those two seconds-short videos but he did in all the other he made when the discussion was about HDD and SSD, as for you not willing to watch his videos, It's your loss!

well unlike him, you're still and you will always be just a random forum guy with 30 years of experience in defragging

 

[roger_m]

Alright he didn't said that in those two seconds-short videos but he did in all the other he made when the discussion was about HDD and SSD, as for you not willing to watch his videos, It's your loss!

I just watched that video and he says absolutely nothing about defragging hard drives. So much for him saying it in all of his videos.

For the record, defragging is not harmful, even if you are using third party defrgarmenters.

well unlike him, you're still and you will always be just a random forum guy with 30 years of experience in defragging

Well he's just some YouTuber with a fairly small tech channel aimed at beginners.

 

[monkeylove]

I checked the scheduled defrag task in the task scheduler to see if the task runs as scheduled. In general (i.e., the process might vary depending on the type of OS used; I'm using Win 8.1 on a desktop PC), it is found Task Scheduler - Task Scheduler Library - Microsoft - Windows - Defrag. If the history option is enabled, one can see if the task runs as scheduled. If it doesn't, then something is causing the PC not to be idle, which in turn does not allow the task to run.

One source states that this can be solved by right-clicking on the ScheduledDefrag task, select "properties," go to the "Conditions" tab, and consider unchecking the boxes that allow the task to run only if the machine is idle. But I think this refers only to desktops and not laptops.

For SSDs, the default defrag should automatically trim them.

Keep in mind, though, that in some regions SSDs might still be expensive because they contain less storage space than hard drives with similar prices. That means they can only be used to store the OS and some apps. Anything else may have to be stored in regular HDs.

Finally, the default defrag might not work quickly or get stuck. This has happened to me twice. After removing more than 50 GB from one hard drive, the defrag got stuck at 0 pct consolidated. I had to use a portable version of Ausdefrag to do a regular defrag of the drive to solve the problem.

 

[LDogg]

For SSD's never. This can reduce the life of your SSD significantly.
HDD's every so often.

Defraggler is a very tool for defragging HDDs.

~LDogg

 

[illumination]

The need to defrag is dependent on whether you do a lot of installs, uninstalls, picture/video uploads/downloads.

I defrag my system after a decent amount of updates/upgrades have been applied to the system, when needed. Even with my powerful system, the difference can be felt, of course i may not perform the same procedure most do when doing it..

I have restore points enabled, after i manually clean the system with windows built in disk cleaner, and quick manual tour through file explorer, flushing browsers, i then create a restore point and delete all but the most recent one i just created, and then defrag the system with built in windows defrag via CMD, so that i may perform a full defrag, boot files, free space ect.

Of course i should mention, my system is bare bones, only just a couple applications i need. Everything else is transferred/stored to external storage. So my machine stays light n tight, and the need to defrag is not often, depends on developers and how fast upgrades/updates come around and how big they are.

I found early on that 3rd party algorithms vary and can actually make the performance worse scattering the file system. Windows built in, handles the file system the way it was intended.

 

[Digerati]

If defrag can kill a SSD than it is not safe at all.

Wow! Have you not read anything said? Defragging a SSD will NOT kill it!

This thread needs to close.