Longest safe span for defrag to run?

[purecomedy]

A few times a year I defrag one of my large multi-gig disk drives where I mostly store movie/music files. As movie files have become larger over the years I find even with minimal fragmentation the defragmenter will want to run 12+ hours.

Is it safe (take time off the life of it?) for your hard drive to defrag continuously for that long?

I'm using defraggler and it seems hell bent on moving all the files to the front of the drive. Quite honestly, if it was willing to allow a gap here or there I feel like it could 95% defrag the drive in probably 10% of the time. Maybe there's better software for me to be using. This isn't the old days of trying to get windows to the outside of the platter for faster loading.

P.S. I had speedfan on and the temp of the drive only went from like 34 C to 37 C after an hour.

[Philip]

12+ hours of moving files around seems like an overkill, and it will stress the drive more. If it is just a media storage drive, files shouldn't be that fragmented anyway. I would use some more conservative settings, or simply rely on the Windows defrag.

On my Linux NAS, I also let my media storage drives sleep and spin-down if unused for an hour or two.