Can you defragment your hard drive to much?

Technically Yes. By defragmenting multiple times, you're putting wear and tear of the hard drive. However, I have several hard drives with over 30k hours of spin time on them and they are still in good health. Once a week is not bad. It actually can be good since it will not have as much work to do as if you only defragmented once every few months. Spinning platters will generate more heat. Heat on hard drives is okay to a certain level, but a long running defragmenting will cause the hard drive to be at a higher heat for a longer amount of time which could increase the risk of potential damage. With all things considered, you're best off leaving the defragmenter to its once-a-week schedule. Unless if this is a SSD in which case you should not be defragmenting at all.

kobaltz

Posted 2013-10-04T05:32:08.963

Reputation: 14 361

Note that starting in windows 8 the "Defragment" utility will actually issue the TRIM commands to SSD disks instead so it is safe to run it, but only if you are running windows 8 or newer.

– Scott Chamberlain – 2013-10-04T05:43:22.980

This is true. Also, if you have a RAID of SSD drives and have Intel Rapid Storage Technology software installed, it will still recognize your RAIDed SSD drives as SSD and will perform the weekly TRIM. – kobaltz – 2013-10-04T05:45:06.890

I don't think you need to think about defragging on recent versions of Windows. It will automatically run the tool for you. I also believe Windows will try to write to the disk in such a way as to avoid and reduce fragmentation. – Louis – 2013-10-04T05:46:03.983

2It is my humble opinion that the Defrag utility in the later versions of Windows (Vista and up) are fairly useless... – TheXed – 2013-10-04T05:46:58.483

It seems to work well: http://i.stack.imgur.com/5mi1H.png

– Louis – 2013-10-04T05:51:30.923

Can you defragment your hard drive to much?

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