How often?
That really depends on what sort of usage a particular system gets and what functions it performs. It also depends on the particular filesystem you're using on your disks; some filesystems are better than others in terms of dealing with fragmentation (or even minimizing it). For example, Microsoft's NTFS filesystem (in general) handles fragmentation a bit better than MS's earlier FAT/FAT32 filesystems, and UNIX/Linux filesystems such as ext2, ext3, and ReiserFS deal with fragmentation much better than either MS filesystem.

Fragmentation as a whole occurs as a result of adds/deletes/changes to the data stored on a drive, so a drive whose contents are pretty much "static" will need to be defragged much less often than a drive whose contents are constantly changing.

Given all of the above, the question isn't really how often to defragment, but at what percentage of disk/file fragmentation do you decide to defrag.
The whole thing is more than a bit subjective; you'll find people who have very strong opinions in one direction or the other in regard to how much of an issue fragmentation really is in terms of overall system performance.

I personally like to keep my Windows machines at 2-3 % fragmentation or less, but that's only due to the fact that I tend to run on the conservative side when it comes to my system maintenance schedule, and defragging is just part of that overall routine. My Linux machines are a totally different story though- due to the filesystems they use, fragmentation just hasn't been an issue in terms of drive/system performance.

I defrag my home computer on a daily basis using a third party defrag software. My servers are done every month or whenever I can remember it. I know I should do the servers more often but I'm too busy doing other things.

And I thought I was conservative in that respect. :mrgreen:

With all due respect Novell52, that's some serious overkill for a home system.

It probably is but I have the program so I might as well just take full advantage of it. I've had it for about a month now and my system seems to start and shutdown faster.

I do the same for my home. I have it set up running in the backround. How is that overkill? I am always deleting files and moving things and installing and uninstalling things. On the servers I manage I can imagine it is much worse so why wouldn't I do the same for them.

You guys might be interested in reading this article that talks about how defrag can lessen the time to backup a server.

http://itresearch.forbes.com/detail/...31551_156.html

A comment I made elsewhere today, in response to a similar concern. The machine referred to is my primary online workplace, by the way.

Ensuring you have ENOUGH drive space and ENOUGH RAM in your system is far more important than frequent defragging on any system, and on a home PC defragging frequently is totally unecessary. The absolute only purpose for which it's appropriate to do so is where the PC is set up for competitively running benchmark tests, and needs to be kept completely tuned.

But come to think of it, such a system gets formatted and reinstalled just about every day, so there's really no need to do that much defragging for ANY purpose, is there?

I was going to suggest Diskeeper for the reason that you can set it to run in the background. A little bit here, a little bit there! It just keeps it defragged.

Agreed. Even if you don't do it everyday. Just the fact that you can schedule it and not have to worry about forgetting to run it is worth having it.