Originally Posted by
sbm12
It will also have a negligible impact on your productivity if you just skip it.
I think there is a misunderstanding here. Defragging on a schedule when the computer is not in use means the user will not need to wait for defrag to finish, or suffer through slow computer performance while defrag runs in background.
bdjohns1's anecdote is a good example on how defrag improves the performance and productivity. While modern SATA2 drives have some performance enhancing features like NCQ, it is still takes many orders of magnitude longer than reading contiguous sectors.
Originally Posted by
mikem132
If you let it go that long, the Windows defragger won't run anyway. Your disk will be too fragmented. Running windows defrag also optimizes frequently used files. With regular use after some time you should see quicker startup of programs you use all the time.
Windows defrag will not run if there is less than 15% space free, but it can be overridden. It will also skip files over 64MB large, this can be overridden as well. Run defrag.exe -? and it will tell you all the options.