I just bought a new HDD about 10 days ago and it is 10 % fragmented already

[mike0007]

Is this normal or not?. my old HDD died after becoming 80 % fragmented in 5 years. but i bought a brand new sata cable for my new HDD and i connected it to a sata port that i never used before. HDD model: Seagate BarraCuda ST1000DM010 connected on ACHI controller and Sata III.

 

[GhislainG]

The old drive didn't fail because it was fragmented, but why didn't you defragment it on a regular basis? Because it was too full? This article explains what causes fragmentation: http://www.nsiserv.com/blog/bid/29346/disk-fragmentation-how-it-happens-and-what-defragging-actually-does

 

[alceryes]

Data fragmentation on a drive has nothing to do with it failing.
A good article explaining disk fragmentation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation

 

[seagate_surfer]

As other users have mentioned here, fragmentation is not the cause of a drive having issues. What you're thinking of may be bad blocks. Bad blocks would mean certain small sections of the drive were starting to not work the way they're supposed to, and could be an indication that the drive may be wearing down. Fragmentation, on the other hand, just means that the way the data is organized on the drive has gotten a bit "messy", with things not being stored on the drive in a way that allows the fastest access to them for performance. A badly defragmented drive is like a teenager with a messy bedroom. Hard drives can be "defragged" or defragmented, which is like cleaning it up to make it more organized and thus perform faster. Here is a link which explains how you can defrag your drives in Windows.

Note: For anyone that has an SSD or Solid-State Drive, defragmenting is considered unnecessary and because of the way those drives are designed, defragmenting actually wears them down quicker (but not for spinning hard drives).

If you'd like to ensure that your drive is in good health, Seagate has a free tool for this called SeaTools here. It's a tool that has different scans and utilities it can run to check on the health of your drive.

 

[grrrrrrrr]

Fragmentation will slow a drive to crawl, but not kill it.

As for your 10% fragmentation, it does happen, due to the fact that certain Windows files grow daily and are never defragged (because the OS is always using them), because browser caches throw an incredible amount of trash on your HD, and because the built in windows defragmenter just isn't that good.

You may want to try clearing your browser caches before defraging and using Defraggler (www.piriform.com) instead of the Windows tool. Also, if you have files that Windows insists on increasing the size of daily (there is one, IIRC "MSFT" in Windows 7) you can move it to the end of your drive by booting with a Windows boot CD (I use Falcon's Ultimate Boot CD) and then using Defraggler to move the file. Then, when it increases in size, it wont fragment the rest of your file system.

Macs handle fragmentation (and many other things) so much more efficiently. Unfortunately, they're not affordable, and can't be upgraded.