cheers,

I gave Auslogics Disk Defrag a go, came out making my pc 5 times faster..noticed the difference straight away. Gonna get more of their software.

I'd have to disagree... I see it in the shop all the time. Defragging the hard drive is what fixes the customer's "slow" computer about 75% of the time... the other 25% being malware (or a good combination of the two).

in the industry we use diskeeper(http://www.diskeeper.com/) on our servers.... the best program out there full stop.

“The OS has a silly habit of trying to reuse every free cluster, even if it’s in the middle of a large occupied area and there’s a lot of free space at the end of the volume,” says Apicella. “So new files end up being scattered all over the drive, which means having to do several seek operations to bring them all together.” But in PC World’s tests, using a host of defraggers yielded no noticeable performance lift.

For the most part, this is just not true -- although there is a small grain of truth here. The reality is that the increases you will see in both performance and free space are negligible, and will more than likely be negated after a couple of hours of normal usage. Defrag utilities date back to the early days of computing, when disk drives were small and slow (at least relative to what you see today). And back then, yes -- occasionally defragging your hard drive would yield some sustained benefits. But with the size and speed of today's drives, defragging a drive is for the most part a waste of time.

Sometimes you will also hear someone suggest defragging the hard drive as a solution to some type of problem with a program that is not working correctly (i.e., program or system crashes). That's total hogwash. All a defrag does is re-organize the data on your hard disk. There's just no way that's going to fix a misbehaving program! As with Myth #1, don't ever let a tech support person tell you a defrag is the answer to your problem.

You don't need to defragment your hard drive very often. Modern drive optimisers like Windows 98's Defrag which position program data according to how often you use it can, indeed, improve performance a bit, but there's no reason for even a heavily used computer to be defragmented every week, or even every month. Yes, it'll be faster if you do. But the difference will probably be tiny.

Hard drive performance in toto makes very little difference to system performance, on machines with adequate physical RAM. The difference in performance between unfragmented and moderately fragmented drives is small, and the larger the drive, for a given level of filesystem activity, the less fragmentation it will suffer.

If you're using Windows NT or 2000 and NTFS-formatted drives, bear in mind that NTFS is famously insensitive to fragmentation - which is just as well, because it's hard to do anything with NTFS without it fragmenting data. This is why Microsoft claimed for so long that NTFS was immune to fragmentation, and no defrag utility was needed at all!

NTFS performs poorly on old drives with lousy seek speed, but the trade-off is that its performance as fragmentation increases remains quite steady. Once the NTFS Master File Table (MFT) becomes fragmented, you can indeed lose performance, but how much you lose still depends on what files are where and how you use the computer. Look at overall system performance, rather than just disk subsystem performance, and the difference due to fragmentation often fades into the noise.

How much effect fragmentation has on performance depends heavily on what files are fragmented, where the fragments lie, and what filesystem you're using. Generally speaking, the upshot of all this is that frequent ritualistic defragmentation, in the absence of a significant measured performance loss (not just how your computer "feels" to you), is, obviously, unnecessary.

Fragmentation certainly can severely degrade system performance, especially on Windows machines without enough physical RAM, or which are doing very disk-intensive tasks like serious database work or high data rate video editing. Defrag weekly, though, and you're probably just going to grow hair on the palms of your hands.

You seem to strongly believe defragging does nothing...