I finally quit using disk defrag on old hard drives after a buddy told me I was killing them slowly

My buddy Rick, who fixes up old PCs from the 90s, watched me defrag a 2003 laptop I was trying to revive. He said "You're basically grinding the heads into the platters on drives this old, stop doing that." I switched to just doing a full format and fresh install, and that old Toshiba has been running solid for 6 months now. Has anyone else gotten bad advice that they just accepted as normal for years?

2 comments

2 Comments

taylorcarr10d ago

My buddy Dave had an old Compaq from 1999 that he was trying to keep alive for nostalgia reasons. He ran disk defrag every single week like clockwork because that's what he learned back in the day. After about four months the drive started making this awful clicking noise and then just died completely. I remember him calling me furious because he lost all his old photos and documents from high school. A repair guy told him the constant defragging wore out the actuator arm until it gave up. Rick was right, sometimes old habits really do destroy old hardware.

jordan65310d ago

Oof, totally did the same thing with an old IBM ThinkPad until a friend stopped me.