Can constant defragmentation damage a regular hard drive?

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Is running daily defrag bad?

I heard some people say that constant defragmentation can damage a hard drive because it does a lot of read/writes.

Is this true?
Am I shortening the life of my drive by doing defragmentations?
I have enable automatic defrgmentation in my Smart Defrag software. Will it do even more damage?

THpubs

Posted 2012-11-04T15:50:35.413

Reputation: 403

Answers

During a normal use of hard drive( wich only purpose is to read/write and keep data safe) You are doing a same thing(read/write) like with defragmentation. For typical hard drives this is not true.

But for Solid State Drives this was indeed true because of specific technology (well for first generation), but all major manufacturers solved that problem.

So, defragmentation should increase performance of some programs on your OS, it will not physically damage your hard drive.

Mislav Novalić

Posted 2012-11-04T15:50:35.413

Reputation: 48

1Defragmentation is not an issue on SSD, it actually doesn't exist in the traditional sense, the controller decides where to place a file ( and has a reason for doing so ). – Ramhound – 2012-11-04T16:26:37.840

And regular hard drive need defragmentation becouse of physical properties. SSD doesn't have magnetic head and circle rotating magnetic plates, that are actually a reason for for defragmentation itself. – Mislav Novalić – 2012-11-04T16:47:48.917

I'm skeptical that constantly keeping the heads moving in a mechanical system would not shorten the life of the drive. Seems like common sense to me. – jjlin – 2012-11-04T18:34:01.930

I was little bit wrong in previous statment. Well I didn't explain it in a good way. Better explaination and simpler is up, above mine. Still, you can't shorten life of yours regular drive with defragmentation. – Mislav Novalić – 2012-11-04T18:43:05.973

I have not seen any evidence that such activity would shorten the life of a magnetic hard drive. It would shorten the life of a solid-state drive - each flash memory cell can undergo a limited number of write cycles before failure - but it is unnecessary to defragment an SSD anyway.

user55325

Posted 2012-11-04T15:50:35.413

Reputation: 4 693

Then what about regular pen drives? I does format them a lot! – THpubs – 2012-11-04T16:04:53.377

Yes, flash memory has a limited number of writes. As I understand it, doing a 'quick format' should be okay, though, since it doesn't actually write to the entire drive the way the 'full format' does. – user55325 – 2012-11-04T16:24:48.810