[dieKatze88]

Originally Posted by LunarAura

Everything in the OP sounds good except disk defragmenting. The performance increase is marginal if not placebo given the recent file handling methods and such a marginal increase isn't worth the cumulative stress put on the HDD imo. Obviously, any OS set to defrag in the background will stress it more and defragmenting is pointless with SSD's. I'm not too versed with why but NTFS seems to benefit less from defragmenting than FAT32.

Actually NTFS benefits more from defragmenting, the difference isn't OS File handling, its disk controller file handling. Most people today have Intel Matrix Storage Controllers in their PCs with Intel processors, the drivers for these controllers can and will intelligently block partitions of space as they write large files to the disk to prevent fragmentation from ever occurring during initial writes, however, when fragmentation does occur (It will happen eventually!) these disks benefit from defragmentation much more than FAT32 disks ever will. I just recently defragmented F: on my server, and it took about a day, but the read times are down from about 80 seconds to list a large directory over the network to about 10 seconds.

Of course, you should NEVER defragment a SSD, and you should defragment in moderation. I defrag my gaming computer at least once a week, but thats because I demand that I never see the "You're on your way to..." screen in Team Fortress 2. My Server gets defragmented very infrequently (>_>) because I don't want to stress the disks that much.