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Is it possible to defrag to much, can this be potentially harmful to your hard drive?

Just curious as I like to defrag my Hard disk every week or so sometimes even more often...

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  • 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. Oct 4, 2013 at 5:46
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    It is my humble opinion that the Defrag utility in the later versions of Windows (Vista and up) are fairly useless...
    – TheXed
    Oct 4, 2013 at 5:46
  • It seems to work well: i.stack.imgur.com/5mi1H.png Oct 4, 2013 at 5:51

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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.

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  • 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. Oct 4, 2013 at 5:43
  • 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
    Oct 4, 2013 at 5:45

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