The pros and cons of regular hard-drive upkeep
By Fred Langa
Is frequent defragging — and similar hard-drive maintenance — worth any potential extra wear and tear on a drive's components?
In that ongoing debate, a comparison of the costs and benefits suggests it is.
Is this a case of too much disk maintenance?
Reader George Hernan wrote this thoughtful note about the tradeoffs of frequent hard-drive maintenance — and whether regular drive maintenance imposes extra wear and tear on the hardware.
"Two drive-related items periodically debated are defragmenting hard drives and backing up data. Whether defragmenting a drive has a significant effect on [PC] operations has been discussed in depth. However, I haven't seen the issue of drive wear considered. The act of quickly accelerating, moving, and stopping any mechanism causes wear; moving the drive-head arm involves cumulative wear.
"While a lot of head movement is involved in defragmenting, the movement is only once for each file segment. Without defragmenting, multiple moves must be repeated each time a file is accessed. To my mind, this alone makes periodic defragmenting a desirable task (which I perform once a week with Auslogics' free Disk Defrag [site]). I'm constantly amazed at how many files are fragmented, even though I'm not a power user.
"I use Macrium Reflect Free [site] to back up my partitions to external drives. Because full backups (just 70GB in two partitions) take less than ten minutes and a restore doesn't take an excessive amount of time, I no longer back up individual files or data; rather, I make a complete backup image of each partition each night. Thus, for the once or twice a year that something goes wrong, I can always recover to a state saved less than 24 hours ago.
"I keep a running library of three weeks' worth of these daily backups, though I've never had occasion to go back more than two days. I do use Windows 7 restore points for the occasional time that my computer doesn't boot as it should. I also run Windows Backup each night to do a complete image backup, which, as a byproduct, also creates a restore point for me each night."
Wow! You're really well protected against data loss, George. With dual backup strategies (via Windows and Macrium), you're possibly doing more than is typically needed.
In most cases, a single backup strategy is more than adequate. And because you're using Windows 7, you're actually in better shape than you might realize: Win7's automatic Restore Previous Version (RPV) function can fill in data protection in between your 24-hour backup increments. It also lets you restore individual files and folders — even if you didn't set out to back them up that way! (Check out the June 16, 2011, Top Story, "RPV: Win7's least-known data-protection system.")
So, you probably could eliminate the Macrium backups with no loss of security. But that's a judgment call on your part. If what you're doing works for you, that's really all that matters.
As for drive wear and tear, I agree with your conclusions. That outmoded "you'll wear out your drives!" thinking comes from the bad old days when hard drives were insanely expensive and had bigger and heavier components.
For example, when the first successful iteration of Windows (3.0) shipped in 1990, a 20MB drive cost around $900. Allowing for inflation, that's the equivalent of about $1,600 today! Hard drives were precious and backup strategies few, so preserving the drive's mechanism was very, very important.
Today, drives are insanely inexpensive. Do the math: that 1990 drive works out to about U.S. $80 per MB in current dollars; a typical, off-the-shelf, 1TB drive today costs around U.S. $100 — or $0.0001 per MB.
What's more, most of today's drives are long-lived. I have some drives in older systems that have been spinning happily for close to 10 years. I literally can't remember the last time I had a hard drive simply wear out. That's not to say that I haven't had drives die on me, but as far back as I can recall, my drive failures were due to physical abuse: a laptop drive that was damaged in a drop (D'oh!), an external USB drive that I knocked off a table (D'oh!2), and so on.
So I agree with you, George. Disk maintenance wear and tear is inconsequential — it's not really worth worrying about. What does matter is that regular disk maintenance — including routine defragging and frequent backups (ideally to a different disk) — gives you fast, safe, and reliable access to your data.
And that's a goal worth achieving!
