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.
DMR
Wombat At Large
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I defrag my home computer on a daily basis
And I thoughtI was conservative in that respect. :mrgreen:
With all due respect Novell52, that's some serious overkill for a home system.
DMR
Wombat At Large
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I do the same for my home. I have it set up running in the backround. How is that overkill?
A comment I made elsewhere today, in response to a similar concern. The machine referred to is my primary online workplace, by the way.Well, I've just defragged my work system for the first time ever. It's now more responsive, of course, but it's hardly a dramatic or even a noticeable improvement. And this on a system that's been subjected to a helluva lot of hard work!
Years back, in the days of ATA33 drives for example, defragging a hard drive could give a big improvement. But now with high rpm and high data transfer drives, the effect is much, much less.
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?
Catweazle
Grandad
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