I just noticed my machine has been defragmenting all my drives once a week- including my 2x 1TB external drives which I just use for picture storage and backup. ; Just wondering if that seems excessive to anyone else?
That does seem like a lot. ; I check for defrag analysis usually once a month, but 4 out of 5 times, analysis says I don't need it. ; I'd say I probably run around 3 times a year per drive.
Used to do it a lot more, especially when hard drives were maxing out at 80/160GB....my laptop before my iMac had two 80GB HDs on it, which was a lot at the time I got it for a laptop that had the power for photography. ; Of course I filled it up quickly then moved to offline storage, so the computer had to defrag more often. ; I'm wondering if the file format has anything to do it too. ; (FAT32 v NTFS)
I do my main boot drive about once a week using iobit ; smart defrag. my external drive I do about every 3 months as I am not writing and deleting files as much as the main drive so it doesn't frag up as much
For the backup drives, that's definitely too often and unnecessary. For the main drive, it depends on usage. If you move around a lot of files or very large files often, then defrag should be done more often. However, even then, it's not a big deal. If the defragmenter runs often, it won't have much data to move around and it will be done fairly quickly. Unless it's seriously slowing down your system when it's running while you're using the system, it's not that big a deal. Erich
I check mine every 3 months, but only defrag when the analysis says I need to which usually means that I only do it twice a year. ;
