I just spent seven hours defragging a 2-TB hard drive, and it occurred to me that this was a silly thing to do.

This drive is 95% filled with nothing but audio files. It is a backup to an identical drive, and is never read, only written to when new files are added. The same can be said for its source-drive twin, except that the source-drive does get read on occasion when I copy files from it into my iPod.

Is there any conceivable benefit that would outweigh the wear and tear of seven hours of head thrashing, other than the feeling of satisfaction of seeing my drive map look like the attached?

With a 5400 RPM system (C:>) drive, is there enough performance gain to justify the wear and tear of defragging? The majority of my work involves writing to single fairly large files, such as a spreadsheet. Are we talking about real speed enhancement here, or is it just an occasional microsecond?

tanstaafl.

I think we're talking dozens of milliseconds at best. Unlikely to be worth the energy cost of the defrag.

Does anyone else get that odd satisfaction from watching all the little pieces move around? I've always liked that for some reason.

BTW, my current favorite defrag program is Defraggler.

I haven't done a single defrag since I moved my last Windows machine onto Windows 2000 and NTFS, about 10 years ago.

I guess defragging might still have an advantage on modern filesystems, as by moving stuff around it gives the disk a good opportunity to rewrite blocks that are going bad ?

I defrag my myth xfs filesystem as that runs fairly full (ie a few Gb free on 3.7Tb - blame Denise!) and is used for writing video streams.

Not much entertainment value though :

Jun 6 07:35:03 teak fsr[1227]: xfs_fsr -m /proc/mounts -t 7200 -f /var/tmp/.fsrlast_xfs ...
Jun 6 08:30:19 teak fsr[1227]: Completed all 10 passes

When I was last running XP on my PVR server, I had to regularly defrag the recording drives or face the possibility of some corruption in the capture files once the drives started getting close to full (20% let's say). At the time, according to the guys at Sage, that shouldn't have been necessary.

There's no third-party defray going now and I still haven't had the corruption issues with Windows 7.

I have a friend who is somewhat sad that one shouldn't defrag an SSD, and also seems to enjoy just watching the process run. I never understood the obsession with it, unless there was a proven benefit. And it's only been in rare cases where I've seen a benefit.

Back prior to switching all our programmers to SSDs, defragging the programmers code drives did help quite a bit both with ensuring Visual Studio ran a little better. It also ensured the game would load faster when they went to debug. Perforce + NTFS + code compile = fragment hell. Diskeeper seemed to work well, with most programmers having enough idle time at lunch to fix up the drive after the morning sync and compile.

I used to enjoy watching the doctor inspect my disks (could only find Mac version)

I have seen significant performance improvements under Windows after defragging a very fragmented C: drive. For data disks, I wouldn't bother. Like you said, it's just going to be a few microseconds improvement. The problem is that those microseconds can really add up quickly on a system drive.

Same here: never seen any benefit since NTFS/WIN2K was introduced. Still, if at some point you migrate to Windows 7, it will do it for you in the background, for your peace of mind. Not at all a significant benefit in real life, I think.

I too used to have fun whatching defrag progress, in the days of FAT/FAT32. For some reason. Certainly I don't miss those days, though.