• Traditional hard drives needs to be occasionally defragged to improve performance.hard drive image by BigDog from Fotolia.com
  
  In the early days of home computing, defragging a hard drive had its risks. The defragging program could move important files to the boot sector of the disk, or the hard drive itself could wear out from the use. Today's hard drives and defragging programs have no such problems, but there are still some important things to consider before attempting to defrag your hard drive.
  
  

Solid State Hard Drives

• Solid state hard drives are designed so all the data on them can be accessed at the same time with no delay, regardless of where on the drive the files are located. Because of this, there is absolutely no need to ever defrag a solid state hard drive. Each time a hard drive is defragged data is written and re-written on each sector of the hard drive. On a solid state hard drive, these sectors have a theoretical limit to how many times they can be written. This number is the in the thousands, but regardless, defragging a solid state hard drive shortens its lifespan needlessly. The same is also true for flash drives and memory sticks.
  
  

Length

• While not exactly a danger, one of the biggest issues to consider while defragging a drive is the amount of time it will take. Very large drives can take hours to defrag, and using your computer during this time period will just make it take even longer. Only defrag when you know you can go without using your computer for several hours.
  
  

Power Outages

• The only way defragging your hard drive could actually damage your computer today is if the power went out during the defragging process. If the defragging program was moving an important file the second the power went out, that file could become corrupted and unusable. If you live in an area that is susceptible to brownouts or power outages, buy an uninterpretable power supply before attempting to defrag your computer.