How Often Should You Defrag?

If you’ve been an avid reader of this blog, then you definitely know by now that defragging is a must. Arranging files in their proper order could definitely optimize your PC’s performance as this would decrease the amount of time that your hard drive’s read-write heads have to look for the files that your programs need.

While defragging is desirable, running your defrag on a daily basis might be a little bit too much already. While hard drives these days are built to outlive your dog or cat, constant defragging could stress it out. Although I’m quite certain that it could bear the stress, I don’t think that you could bear the wait. Depending on the number of files or programs that you have in your primary storage device, the process could take anywhere from a few minutes to around an hour.

So, how often should you defrag? Well, it depends. If you have tons of files or programs in your hard drive and you constantly add or erase many of them, then regular defragging is a must. Once or twice a week would already do. However, if you rarely add or remove any file in your hard disk, then a daily session of this optimization method would already be overkill.

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Posted by Ruel on June 23rd, 2008 .
Filed under: PC Optimization, PC Speed | No Comments »