On Sat, 26 Oct 2019 15:11:38 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Shadow wrote:


If your drive is not badly fragmented, I'd look for other
culprits for the "slowness".
[]'s

You don't run defrag on an injured disk.

Agreed. I'm assuming his drive is OK.

You do a backup first.

I do a partial one every day (important data). My last drive
burned the controller. The disk itself was perfect, according to SMART
(HDSentinel), right up to the "poof, it's gone".

Then you can do whatever you feel like, without fear.

Defragmenting involves a lot of head movement,
and it involves writes. If the disk is running low
on spares, or if the Reallocated is constantly
growing with the writes you're doing, you are
treading on thin ice.

IAWT.
But the OP was asking about defragmenting. I gave my routine.
UltraDefrag doesn't pound the drive much when it does a simple
analysis. If that analysis shows it's only slightly fragmented, there
are a lot of other things it could be: startups, corrupted drivers,
failing MB or drive, malware, even a loose DVD cable - the cause of my
last computer's "freezes for 20 seconds then works normally".
[]'s
--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012