Constantly needing Defrag

[Shafra]

I'm not sure what's up. Recently I've been needing to defrag by HDD like once a week. I'm running a 250GB Sata 2 Western Digital Drive. The only thing I can think of that I changed is that I switched to Emule for P2P downloads. Is this messing up my HDD?

If so I'm thinking about buying a small hard disk just to use as the boot drive so I won't see such a hit in performance. Or maybe even just run Emule on my 2nd PC.

I've never needed HDD defrags so much. Even windows suggests I do it, looks like 80% of my files every week are flagged "red" for fragmented.

 

[Win2kpatcher]

Is the performance that bad that you NEED to run the defrag? and when you do run it is it very noticable the performance picks back up?

 

[xtraze]

I cant even remember when I last run it.
Anyway, it must bring up some performance wont it. But these are commonly un-notable.

 

[forrestcupp]

Sounds like your harddrive might be about to go out. I'd back up everything important if I were you.

 

[Shafra]

Yes, the performance gets bad. Well, I guess I won't say BAD, but it gets slower. I'm just noticing the connection between tons of fragmented files and the use of the Emule program for P2P.

Can this really be a sign the disk is dying? I'll stop using Emule for a week and see what happens. If it's still bad, I'll get a new drive. This one isn't even a year old yet.

 

[EricB]

partition your drive and only put windows a 30 40 gig partition. then store your data on the rest

http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=126882

http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=56137

 

[Menekali]

This may be a stupid question, but how many fonts do you have installed on your system? Excess of maybe... 8-900? I've got over 20k on mine, but NOT installed, I use a font management software for mine.

If you've got a TON of fonts installed on your system, it decreases system performance substantially. Otherwise, i would begin backing up my important documents now as someone else suggested, and running a few tests on the hdd. A few sectors may be failing at this point.