i must admit to having kfitting's fears regarding defragging as well.. but i don't know anything about whether its well founded, it's just a gut level reluctance to having the hard drive going insane moving stuff around like mad more than it has to.  my general approach has been to use a defragmenter occasionally, maybe once every coupld of months.  but that's based just on superstition not on any informed information.

but i don't know anything about whether its well founded, it's just a gut level reluctance to having the hard drive going insane moving stuff around like mad more than it has to.

I'm defragging HDs at least once a week (I like the file structure to be clean and access to be fast) and NEVER had a single problem because of that.

Oooh, the www.kessels.com site has source for the command-line defragmenter, cute

As for heat generation issues, you should always have a 80 or 120mm fan in front of your harddrives. In normal system use, it means a temperature difference of ~20C around here (Denmark... Scandinavia... aka cold).

Yes, it makes a good room heater in the winter too, especially when combined with the GPU fan on high intensity games (though it ups the AC bill if you have that sort of thing).

But, speed aside, what about harddisk thrashing?  It just doesn't seem like it's a good thing to make the harddrive heads slam around all the time.  Speed is a secondary concern to me... I care about the life of my harddrive!  Is this a valid reason to defragment?

Kevin

EDIT: After re-reading my post, I dont think I made much sense even to myself , so let me edit my post and add this, before I am misunderstood: some people claim that regular defragmentation can actually *reduce* the life of your HDD because of heavy read-write activity. I personally think this is utter rubbish, and the opposite is actually true.

And if your HDD fails because of defragging, then it was faulty to begin with....HDDs these days should be able to do some reasnoably heavy duty stuff and keep going without blinking. I believe they are engineered with this in mind.

I have never heard about any HDD failure due to defragging. But keep in mind that other factors also come into play such as the temperature, dust, humidity etc. I have a 80mm fan in the front panel of my Centurion 5 case blowing air over the HDDs, keeping them reasonably cool but not as cool as I'd like. Ideally a 120 mm fan would be nice, but it wont fit in the casing in front.

I dont see any cons of defragging....

It should do, urlwolf. It's an option though - go to Configuration - Advanced Configuration and select the "Removable Storage" tab...

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EDIT: added screenshot - I'm a SnagIT fiend today (with apologies to mouser)!

Yes - I'd meant to underline the blurb above the radio button about checking with the manufacturer for compatability and see that I didn't... Right, off to do that now!