Why should you NOT defrag a SATA hard drive?

There is absolutely no reason for not defragmenting your SATA hard drive and in fact it is highly recommended to defrag it frequently. If you don't defrag your hard disk filesystem for quite long, it will lead to increased seek time and slower read-write, thus effectively slowing down your computer.

Simply saying, defragmentation is a process of reducing the amount of fragmentation in a file systems. Defragmentation software does this by physically reorganizing the contents of the hard disk to store the pieces of each file closer together, so disk head does not have to move all over disk surface to read a full content of a file.

Furthermore, as you probably noticed I'm talking about file-system, not physical disk hardware. This is because fragmentation doesn't have anything to do with the hardware, it is solely file-system related issue. For instance, there is no need to defrag hard disk if you use Linux, because the ext3 file-system does not need to be defragmented as it can effectively prevent fragmentation. However, file-systems use on Windows such as FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS will surely need to be defragmented once in a while.

In short summary, the information provided to you by Dell's tech support is incorrect. You should run defrag at least once a month, especially for the disk where your operating system files are stored.

There is no reason why you can not or should not defrag a SATA hard drive. The only difference between a SATA HD and an IDE HD is the interface in which it transfers data from the drive to the motherboard. I've had SATA HD's in my systems for years and have never encountered a problem performing a defrag on the Hard Drives

Clearly it is a mistake. Yes defragmenting your hard drive may wore-down your drive performance because your drive will operating all the way defragment does (scanning for virus do this too, and any of disk operation will do too) and it's apply to any drive. Take this analogy: You have CD and you play it almost all day non-stop. Won't it scratch? Won't your CD-ROM drive's lens getting weaker? But these problem normally won't came until your computer celebrate its 5 or higher anniversary.

Things that gonna harm your HDD are:

1. Magnet

2. Bad Electricity

3. Shock

4. Fluid spill

5. Dust (least likely)

6. Some viruses (made bad sectors)

7. Heat

Someone help me finish this list.. ^_^