Make Hard Drives Last
In a recent read done by our company it was found that defragmentation of hard drives can cause them to last longer.
For this reason, we feel that you should regularly defragment your hard drive.
Defragmentation of the hard drive, however, isn't always an easy thing. Some customers encounter the dreaded restart condition and bailout because defrag could not properly claim the entire drive. What happens here is that defrag bails out because the disk 'is changing'. This can be overcome by running a command line version of the same utility.
Another issue revolves around the fact that defragmenting an entire disk drive is inherently a very dangerous operation as block afer block is erased and rewritten to a different location. If a computer were to lose power in the middle of rewriting a system block, chaos could ensue.
Nevertheless, if you engage in good backup practices (safe computing!) you can safely defragment your hard drive and the odds of anything going wrong are remote. It may, however, take many hours to accomplish the compaction of disk sectors. For this reason, undertake the challenge when you have plenty of time. Make sure to shut down screensavers, sleep timers and the like. Learn the command line version of defrag and do not be afraid to run it in Safe mode under the console flavor.
Another thing that crops up is a warning insisting that disk check be run before defrag. This may happen if defrag finds there are bad blocks on the disk that haven't been marked as such. To run the check disk, simply run explorer, right click the C drive and go into properties, then tools, then Check Now (Microsoft Page). Depending upon the O/S you are on, the system may insist that checkdisk be scheduled as part of the next initialization (boot) cycle. It is advisable that the customer goes through with this. One can find innumerable resources on running Check Disk so we encourage our customers to find out more on their own.
Many whitepapers make claims that running defragmentation on the page file and master file table greatly increases system reliability (Executive Software - The Effects of Disk Fragmentation on System Reliability - Technical Whitepaper). This is axiomatic; we know that disk mechanisms are working much harder in the presence of extreme fragmentation.
Judging from personal experience, we regularly defragment our Toshiba Satellite's hard drive and the computer has far exceeded the normal lifespan of a laptop computer. When customers complain that they can't believe their hard drive is already shot after 9 months of use, we have to wonder just how much more wear they would have gotten had they defragmented on a regular basis (or perhaps a simple surge protector could have prevented the drive from getting fried by a house wiring spike).
A more obvious way to make hard drives last is to treat them with TLC. They are sensitive to shock, although we hear that one of the new laptop models actually has an airbag which deploys if the laptop is dropped. More on that soon!