regular defrag can damage PC…
hey guys heres another Q., a friend of mine asked me how much do i defrag my system, and i told him everyday. he told my that my habit of defragin’ everyday can damage my PC. Is that for a fact? if so what damages can it cause? thanks!!!
peace…
Defragging involves acessing most or all of the hard disk several times as blocks are checked and moved around. So a defrag involves a whole lotta disk action to complete.
Will frequent defragging damage your PC? Well, it may wear out your disk drive a little faster. Also, there’s a remote risk that if you’re in the middle of defragging when the power goes out, you might lose or corrupt some of the data that was being shunted at that time.
I don’t think there’s any benefit to defragging a modern machine daily. Manual defragging isn’t usually necessary unless there’s clearly a problem due to fragmentation.
I don’t run a separate audio drive, so i don’t know what the best practices would be for that, but I still can’t see the need to defrag it more than a couple times a year.
I agree that defrag is not necesary to do daily, most if you are using NTFS file system, the defrag will be reduced because it have a more efficient way to organize archives.
thanks for the answer guys! you gave such a good technical side about this defrag thing cause my friend didnt explain it that much he just told me that it can be dangerous. thanks again arch & marce!
peace…
I defrad my audio drive at least once a week, if I’m doing alot of work. I’ve never had a problem & the drive definitely is in need of defragging. Whether it helps or not, I do not have any quantitative data on that - I just do it out of faith. 
I run defrag on my system drive whenever I felt like it.
I have been defragging and flossing regularly since the early 80s. The flossing has caused some bleeding of the gums but I have never had a problem I could attribute to defragging.
A guy at work uses Disk Cleanup regularly and I have come to believe that causes a lot more problems than it solves. The computers he messes with are hosed up on a regular basis. Maybe he is flossing over the computer.
Yeah - my wife hates when I floss too much. It creates this stuff she calls “flickem” which ends up on our bedroom mirror 
Mr Soul
Mr. Soul, are you flossing in the bedroom 
Dave T2
Hopefully you guys won’t spawn a dental higene duscussion 
Dear savingedmund,
At 52, priorities begin to shift. I’m thinking of starting a Website devoted to the concerns of the aging musician:
First topic: Your Teeth and Hemorrhoids-keeping them and getting rid of them
Now I know why everyone used to say it is a good idea to get used to playing the guitar standing up.
Can too much flossing make your head hurt? Is it best to put the yarn in the left ear and pull it out the right ear? Or, the other way round?
Sorry guys… don’t get me going…
I defrag my old P-111 mabey once a week… But not any more than that… I have six drives in it… a total of 240 gigs of space. Sometimes it takes an hour to complete the defrag…
Bill…
Bill, if you are going straight from one ear to the other, that is so WRONG! The correct path is ear (left, right, allee samee unless you listen to those whacko ######## culties) to nostril, other nostril to other ear. This is the accepted method for cleaning all wax from the sunuses the lord saw fit with which to gift us even though we really don’t need them except for singing high lonesome music…
'til next time;
wynot
I’ve lost drives to failure, but I don’t think it was due to defragging, them…
O>k. I’ll work on that… You sure ya don’t need a nose ring to loop that yarn through?
I’m soo lonesome, in my saddle sense my horse died… 
Bill…
There’s no benefit to defragging more than necessary, and there are possible detriments:
1) Some songs that used to play might not play any more. This is because, when you’re recording many tracks at once, they get interleaved nicely. Defrag and they get separated, which is less than ideal. So, defragging unnecessarily makes your drive work harder. Note that this only applies to folks who record lots of tracks at once. Also, nTrack can handle a pretty high track count even on a fairly slow drive, so this is a minor point. But I just wanted to point out that defragged is not necessarily better.
2) There’s always a possibility of corruption or power failure. During defragging, you’re doing most I/O to the most sensitive part of the filesystem, the structure itself (rather than mostly file contents). Sure, the probability of failure is low, but why push your luck?
When recording, it is good to have a fair amount of contiguous free space. But, unless you have a terribly small hard drive, it shouldn’t be necessary to defrag very often. The best policy is no more than once a month or as needed. With the very large drives we have today, unless you’re churning out projects, defragging every 6 months should be fine!
I know some folks love to see a nice clean defrag display. But this is not a situation where fastidiousness is a virtue.
Hmmm…since Jeff mentioned interleaving…does anybody remember that app that re-interleaves .wav files? Got a URL handy?
Thanks,
TG
I’ve used that utility on earlier computer builds. I have the .exe file on a CD, somewhere… I don’t have it installed on this latest build, though.
Bill…
It is called interleave, and you can get it at Shareware Music Machine. It is free, and works well, but weird. You have to move all your .wav files to a temporary directory, then it will copy them back to the original directory, interleaving them as it goes. Then you will have a puddle of backup files in the temp directory to save, or toss away after you make sure the process worked. I have been using it for a couple years, and it does seem to reduce the workload for nTrack when the wavs are freshly interleaved. Btw, nTrack will see the files as modified, and build new .npk files, which may take a few moments on big projects. Oh, it is good to use it on directories with samples, such as you might use with Leafdrums or FruityLoops, but it may not have as noticable an effect since the files tend to be much smaller, and interleaving may not be as critical…
'til next time;
wynot
Hmmm.....since Jeff mentioned interleaving.....does anybody remember that app that re-interleaves .wav files? Got a URL handy?
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/audio/interlv.htm
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/audio/interlv.htm