Defragging HD

Crusty

Lifer
Sep 30, 2001
12,684
2
81
I have a question about defragging hard drives. I know what it does, but I've read some places that defragging a NTFS drive won't make a difference, while at other places i've read that it will still make a difference. Which is true?
 

dbwillis

Banned
Mar 19, 2001
2,307
0
0
I know it makes a difference on the junky old boxes we have here at work.
NT4, sp5, Office 2000, Nav 5, several SMS services running, several IE windows open at the same time and all the corporate junk.
Frequent lockups....all on a 200mhz PC..some have never been defragged..1st time to defrag takes about 4 hrs
The customers call back to say the PC's are extremely faster than they were before so its noticable here.
At home, I cant tell any dfifference on my XP or 2000 boxes..but then again, Defrag runs on Tuesday and Thursdays each week for me.
 

cleverhandle

Diamond Member
Dec 17, 2001
3,566
3
81
For what they're worth, my Sandra disk benches have seen increases of over 10K points after a defrag under XP, even when the utility only lists ~6-8% fragmentation. Of course, this makes me suspect that Sandra is not a very accurate bench, since I don't notice much difference, but still - there must something happening there.

Think I'll defrag while 24 is on the tube... Cheers!