Defragging is not wearing out your drive. The opposite is true. The life expectancy of a HD is over 100,000 hours and that is 11 years if you leave it on all the time. I have a number of HDs running fine well over 6 years some over 10. Not defragging just makes it harder on your drive because when the data is scattered all over the place the HD thrashes around to assemble the data.
If your HD is almost full or if you have a bunch of jobs running Windows will page the data to a hard drive, if it can't page it to memory, while it loads data for the other job. The more jobs you have running the more this will happen. The best way to prevent this is to have lots of memory and multiple drives, one for programs, the other for data and the third for back up. You also need lots of memory so windows can page to memory rather than paging to disk. If you changed the way windows manages your memory you may have shot yourself in the foot. Windows uses lots of memory to page to memory rather than disk. I have huge hard drives and rarely defrag, once a year maybe, on one system with the drive configuration as above and 3 GB of memory. It rarely thrashes or pages to disk. The other is older, half full drives and 500 MB of memory and thrashes itself to death. Scan you disk for bad sectors. If it has any/many keep an eye on it and back your data up NOW and make sure you know where all your program disks are! A good idea is to buy a separate drive and back everything up to it. HDs are so cheap now that is not a problem. This is how disks store data. When you load programs, music, movies, or anything that is static, they do not change, the data is sequential and will not get fragmented. You will not have to defrag that data. When you load data and change it all the time the data gets fragmented and it is best to put this type of data on a separate disk and defrag it once in a while. If you have a huge drive partition it so you don't have programs and data on the same logical drive. Put data in a partition by itself. Barry --- In [email protected], "J. Biran" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > If the age of your drive is nearing the length of its > warrantee you can start being concerned, drives Do fail > before their warrantee runs out but not very typical. > > > > I believe that defragmenting is wearing out drives, and only > do that once a week. > > > > If the noise is just disk access and not mechanical grinding > or knocking, it could come from disk indexing running at > idle (if you have Microsoft desktop search or similar > installed). > > > > -- > > Joseph Biran > ____________________________________________ > > From: [email protected] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ken Close > Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 11:31 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [amibroker] OT: Hard Disk Problem > > > > I know this is Off Topic but maybe someone has had a similar > experience or can offer advice from their expertise. > > > > I am going along, and all of a sudden my main hard drive > (C:) starts up an incessant and continuing chatter. Loud > enough to really notice. > > There is no other indication anything is wrong. CPU cycles > are normal for what is open. (Usually have various programs > with browser open with many tabs). I have extra RAM and an > onboard monitor does not indicate that the RAM is low. I > defrag automatically every night. I have latest download/OS > upgrades. > > > > I shut down all applications and exit in normal manner (once > I held the computer power on button down to shut down > without going through the shut down sequence--just to try it > that way). Either method of shutdown makes the computer > .... well .... shut down. Then normal restart, and back to > business. > > > > These events occur every so many days even a week or more. > It has happened three or four times, and does not seem to be > increasing in frequency. > > > > Normally, this would call for a new hard drive, but I have > no clue as to cause and no indication that the drive is > getting ready to fail (like increased events). > > > > Any comments or suggestions? > > > > Thanks, > > Ken > > > > I am backed up with full image of drive on external drive so > I am safe from that standpoint. >
