What harm does defragmentation do to the hard drive?

Defragmentation refers to rearranging the physical location of files on the hard disk to make them more contiguous on the disk to increase file reading and writing speeds. Generally speaking, defragmentation will not cause direct damage to the hard drive.

However, defragmenting too frequently or incorrectly may cause potential damage to the hard drive. Specifically, defragmenting a hard drive multiple times may accelerate wear and tear on the hard drive and shorten its life. In addition, when defragmentation operations are performed, the magnetic heads need to constantly read and write data on the disk, which will reduce the performance of the hard disk and increase the risk of its temperature rising.

In addition, if you use some unsafe defragmentation tools, it may cause problems such as file loss or data corruption. Therefore, when performing defragmentation operations, you should use some reliable tools and back up important data regularly to prevent data loss.

In short, defragmentation correctly can improve the performance and life of the hard drive, but defragmentation too frequently or incorrectly may cause potential damage to the hard drive. Therefore, you need to use caution and choose reliable tools when performing defragmentation operations.