Defragmentation is useless!

[Bovinicus]

Originally posted by: merlocka
People who use defrag are wusses.

It's like that annoying guy who has to have all his CD's in the proper order...

As far as people claiming speed inprovements after defrag, doesnt' a HD have like a 9ms access time? So like if a block of data was chopped into 100 chunks, all over the drive (likely???), that would be like 1 extra second of delay?

C'mon now, let's think about this.

I've been maintaining these stupid windows PC's for years and the only benifit that I'm certain defrag buys you is an manditory scan disk.

I wouldn't say that we are wusses, just perfectionists and tweakers. It's no skin off my back. If I ever defragment, then I do it while I am sleeping. It doesn't waste any of my time.

 

[merlocka]

Originally posted by: igowerf

Originally posted by: merlocka
People who use defrag are wusses.

It's like that annoying guy who has to have all his CD's in the proper order...

As far as people claiming speed inprovements after defrag, doesnt' a HD have like a 9ms access time? So like if a block of data was chopped into 100 chunks, all over the drive (likely???), that would be like 1 extra second of delay?

C'mon now, let's think about this.

I've been maintaining these stupid windows PC's for years and the only benifit that I'm certain defrag buys you is an manditory scan disk.

But when your drive gets really fragmented, files (especially big ones like video files or video game data files) can have more than 500 fragments. According to your calculations, that would be 5 seconds of delay. It's even worse when you're using a 4200 RPM laptop hard drive.

You're using worst case^2... how often do people manipluate giant video files on laptops? If they do, they deserve to wait 2 minutes and 55 seconds versus 2 minutes and 50 seconds if they defragmented...

Anyway, I highly doubt your data on 500 fragments especially because I pulled the 100 fragments number completely out of my ass.

 

[Sheriff]

Can we move on to cleaning and defraging the Registry?

 

[gsellis]

First, some of the defrag vendors do "oversex" the arguments and I have said so to their faces. On a standard desktop, where all of the software is pushed to it via some corporate mechanism and the user's Documents are redirected to a server, defrag should never be an issue. The only "fragmentation" that is happening steadily is internet cache and it gets flushed over time. So the time it wastes does not justify it, although watching the "progress" display has sort of a special entertainment value.

Yes, I do see performance increases on my video editing boxes after a big defrag, but it never is "oh my god, how did I live with that?" On my workstation that I do OS build creation with, it can increase performance so, but I do serious swapouts and deletes on it all the time (2-10 GB at times).

As for those of us hanging out here, we mess with too much garbage and need to reorganize the mess occassionally.

 

[CraigRT]

I notice a difference easily on badly fragmented drives... defragging is most certainly not useless.

 

[GrumpyMan]

Also on some deframenting programs they move the page file to the outer part of the disk for quicker access for windows I do believe which is also a benefit.

 

[addragyn]

Apple users wouldn't care ("Music no work" ..... "picture no move" ... "Mongo sad" ....) (Just kidding, Mac people, save the flames :beer: ) If you're running the BSD-based OS, it shouldn't care much about fragging either.

They don't need to. OS X 10.3 has "Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering" and automatic defrag.

"The first is automatic file defragmentation. When a file is opened, if it is highly fragmented (8+ fragments) and under 20MB in size, it is defragmented. This works by just moving the file to a new, arbitrary, location. This only happens on Journaled HFS+ volumes.

The second is the "Adaptive Hot File Clustering". Over a period of days, the OS keeps track of files that are read frequently - these are files under 10MB, and which are never written to. At the end of each tracking cycle, the "hottest" files (the files that have been read the most times) are moved to a "hotband" on the disk - this is a part of the disk which is particularly fast given the physical disk characteristics (currently sized at 5MB per GB). "Cold" files are evicted to make room. As a side effect of being moved into the hotband, files are defragmented. Currently, AHFC only works on the boot volume, and only for Journaled HFS+ volumes over 10GB."

Apple hired the engineer behind BeOS' file system. I'm optimistic we'll be seeing some very cool FS developemts for OS X.

With any modern OS and a enough space on your drive fragmentation will not be a signifigant problem. *nix has been like this. Any MS OS with NTFS is in the same boat. Modern file systems will generally find a space on the drive where the file can be written contigously. FAT is another story...

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: merlocka
People who use defrag are wusses.

It's like that annoying guy who has to have all his CD's in the proper order...

As far as people claiming speed inprovements after defrag, doesnt' a HD have like a 9ms access time? So like if a block of data was chopped into 100 chunks, all over the drive (likely???), that would be like 1 extra second of delay?

C'mon now, let's think about this.

I've been maintaining these stupid windows PC's for years and the only benifit that I'm certain defrag buys you is an manditory scan disk.

We're talking milliseconds (thousandths of a second) here. The rest of the computer thinks in nanoseconds (billionths of a second). The hard drive's access time is pitifully slow compared to just about anything else in the computer, except the floppy drive and optical drives. Anything to help alleviate that bottleneck is good in my book.

 

[Viper96720]

Defragging every week now that's too much.

 

[PrinceXizor]

Defragmentation makes a HUGE difference in media encoding, effects work, editing, etc. If you do any type of semi-pro (even amatuer) audio recording using programs such as Cubase, Sonar, eLogic, ProTools, etc. it is recommended that you use a CLEAN hard drive that's only job is to store your audio tracks. Why? Because its impossible to do realtime playback/looping/editing if the data is scattered to timbuktu on your hard-drive. The same principles apply to video work too.

Now, does the average user need to defragment? Occasionally, as one of the main reasons to defragment is NOT speed gain, but to ensure that data does not get corrupted. Remember, there is a margin of error in everything (even the "perfect" world of digital), and if you spread out data too far, too much, you run the risk of not being able to put the puzzle back together again. As dullard mentioned in an earlier post, the overall speed gains for an "average" user will run between 3-5%...not really worth the hassle (compared to their insane addiction to having every little blasted program loaded...aaarrgghhh), but the data integrity angle is worth defragging every six months or so.

But if you do any work that relies on long sustained SEQUENTIAL reads and writes in order to function properly, then it behooves you to defragment on a regular basis.

P-X

 

[TechnoPro]

Originally posted by: merlocka

Originally posted by: igowerf

Originally posted by: merlocka
People who use defrag are wusses.

It's like that annoying guy who has to have all his CD's in the proper order...

As far as people claiming speed inprovements after defrag, doesnt' a HD have like a 9ms access time? So like if a block of data was chopped into 100 chunks, all over the drive (likely???), that would be like 1 extra second of delay?

C'mon now, let's think about this.

I've been maintaining these stupid windows PC's for years and the only benifit that I'm certain defrag buys you is an manditory scan disk.

But when your drive gets really fragmented, files (especially big ones like video files or video game data files) can have more than 500 fragments. According to your calculations, that would be 5 seconds of delay. It's even worse when you're using a 4200 RPM laptop hard drive.

You're using worst case^2... how often do people manipluate giant video files on laptops? If they do, they deserve to wait 2 minutes and 55 seconds versus 2 minutes and 50 seconds if they defragmented...

Anyway, I highly doubt your data on 500 fragments especially because I pulled the 100 fragments number completely out of my ass.

You're wrong with your assumptions. The defrag utility in XP can tell you which files are most heavily fragmented and their number of fragments.

On my HDD, I have the MandrakeMove ISO (think Knoppix). It is 617 MB in size and composed of 23,980 fragments. A wee bit more than 500.

I have DivX movies that range from 2,000 to 7,000 fragments.

Downloading and/or ripping large files (movies, ISOs, etc.) is becoming prevalanet because we have more broadband, and storage size has increased tremendously. So numbers like mine are not uncommon.

 

[CQuinn]

A couple of items that the "normal system use doesn't fragment" arguers seem to overlook.

The more modern a version of windows is, the more likely it is to have additional services running
that "help" with file management on a standard partition. Those utilities can actually increase
file fragmentation over time.

Nearly every application that is run causes the generation of some sort of tracking file that
Windows tries to use to optimize application performance. Those files themselves add up.

Many applications that open files can generate temporary copies of the file in use. Too many
of those apps don't bother to clean up after themselves very well, leaving fragmented files
behind.

As I mentioned before: download utilities (P2P apps, Bittorrent, Getright, etc) can allocate
either the whole amount of space needed for a file before downloading, or ceate a "stub"
file that they fill in later - producing a deliberate form of fragmentation as they fill in the
file.

On NTFS, as files are accessed/touched, they can result in updating of file attributes in the MFT,
even if the files themselves remain unedited.

As files are deleted, they may still take up allocation space in the Recycle bin, that is not reclaimed
until the bin is emptied, creating gaps within a contiguous file structure.

Depending on how the OS applies its write cache, it can end up placing file update where it is most
convenient to write them, instead of where it is most efficient.

And there are many people who have not turned off the indexing service for their filesystems, or
chose to enable encyption or compression for files on top of NTFS.

all of these things can affect fragmentation to a lesser degree, taken together they can have
a noticable impact on system performance.