How often do you defrag your hard drives

[chris ashdown]

Just wondered how often people defrag, I must admit normally only a couple of times a year and then it takes forever

If these super dooper computers are so clever why can they not sort out where they put the 1's and 0's themselves:D

[Chunkford]

One 1 of the PC's i work on i schedule a defrag Sun at 2am every week. I only do this as i do a lot of image work with this PC - deleting, copying, moving etc.

On my personal laptop i don't think i have done one yet, and i've had it a year

[fergusw]

Chris,
They already do :)
"Windows Vista includes a disk defragmenter that runs in the background and automatically defragments the hard disk as need arises"
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/performance.aspx

In fact, there is a video on the web somewhere with a bunch of tech-heads from MS and other "independent" experts bestowing the virtues of Vista and the myriad of things it does in the background that help the end user. Defragmenting automatically was one of many that stuck in my head!

[NormanRouxel]

Since we're talking about disks here's what I did recently to give my main system a signigficant speed boost.

I run a C drive with mainly O/S / installed Programs and a much bigger D drive for data (e.g. all Actinic sites - I do a lot of testing and have about 350).

I replaced the C drive with a Kingston 64GB V Series SSD and Windows now seems close to twice as fast. A great increase in productivity for about £87. The SSD came with software that would image the existing drive onto the new. I didn't need it as I use Acronis to back up so had a ready to load image of my C drive already waiting.

Back to the original topic, restoring an image onto a new empty drive resulted in a defragged drive as an added bonus.

[fergusw]

Very interesting Norman, and a very good idea. I'm going to give that a try as I run the OS and programs on C with data split on separate drive and partition.

Thanks for that tip.

[Duncan Rounding]

...Actinic sites - I do a lot of testing and have about 350...

You should apply for a Guinness World Record with that Norman.