VanguardLH wrote:
> "Bill in Co." wrote in <news:OgF5mTFuIHA.4952@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl>:
>
>> VanguardLH wrote:
>>> "rick s" wrote in
>>> <news:4C4390A7-08CB-4E70-9695-FF9880DA1801@microsoft.com>:
>>>
>>>> Someone told me that the more you run disk defrg the better chance of
>>>> destroying your hard drive. Is this true?
>>>
>>> The more activity, the more wear, just like the more you use your
>>> bicycle the more likely the chain will break. So, do you not use your
>>> hard disk at all between these defrags? You power up, do a defrag, and
>>> then power down until the next time you defrag?
>>
>> This begs the question: just how much is the MTBF reduced by running a
>> defrag more often? I'm not sure anyone has collected the data to
>> really
>> know. I bet its impact is minimal, however, in practical terms.
>
> Like begging the question as to how much shorter is the MTBF if there is
> less physical RAM so more pagefile space must be used.

Yup Another interesting question. :-)

> I know of users that like to use the flash memory thumb drives for
> pagefile space not realizing how often the pagefile gets used.

Sounds like a BAD idea (per below).

> Flash memory does wear out due to oxide stress. There is logic available
> on
> the drive to mask out bad areas but eventually the reserve gets used up
> and the thumb drive suddenly and catastrophically dies taking the
> pagefile with it and any changes saved there during the current Windows
> session.

Right. We just had a discussion on that in the other group, and how the
flash memory lifetime is limited to begin with, and running defrag on it can
significantly reduce its lifetime. (Someone mentioned a figure of only
1000 erase/writes for each cell, but that the overall memory lifetime, from
a user's standpoint, is increased (by the chip logic you mentioned), so that
the end result is the average lifetime figure is more like 10,000 - 100,000
erase/write cycles.