Is defragging relevant to improving disk performance anymore?

Is defragging relevant to improving disk performance anymore? Does it stil make much difference, now that we have much faster and larger HDDs? Generally I find if disk performance is getting too slow, it's probably because of too little free space, and the solution is to buy a new HDD.
Asked by: Guest \| Views: 174

Total answers/comments: 4

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Guest [Entry]

It is still relevant, but since the release of Vista, Windows has automatically defragged your hard drive when the computer was sitting idle. If you leave your computer idle for long periods, this is no longer something which must be done manually.

Guest [Entry]

"Yes.

On my friend's PC (XP, NTFS, 80GB HD, ~750MB free), the 700MB pagefile was in 11,000 fragments, and the MFT was in 40 fragments. I cleaned up the hard drive, defragmented, and rebooted, and the difference was very noticeable."

Guest [Entry]

I think it's still relevant. I have a C2Duo/2Gb/250Gbx2 setup, and even with the mirrored "small" drives, defragging seems to help tremendously with startup and program load times.

Guest [Entry]

I would say it still makes sense - specially on hard drives that get a lot of file activities. I run MyDefrag at work to keep my hard drive from getting too fragmented, since at work I usually work on several revision depots that can have thousands of file changes in one day - keeping it defragged really helps on open read performance of the bigger art files I work with, but also on the speed of my text searches.