Does Defrag always take sooo long?

[MaxAnalyst]

I've got a 600 MHz PIII processor on an Asus P3V4X board running Win98. I recently upgraded from a 133MHz and I used to be able to defrag pretty quickly, meaning it would read and reposition the data at an efficient speed. However, with my new setup, defragging takes a lot longer - literally days. I had to stop defragging my HD after 3 days continuous defragging and it didn't finish. What's up with this? I pulled all the PCI / ISA cards out and closed everything except Systray and Explorer when I did this, so not conflicts there. My system drive is a Maxtor 13Gig, less than a year old. I also downloaded the Windows ME defrag.exe file from surecool.com and tried it, but it didn't change anything.

Anybody have this experience and find a way to speed it up? Is this normal? I thought a 600MHz processor would zip a defrag like a warm knife through butter. Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks!

 

[bolomite]

Make sure that absolutely everything running in the background is shut down (besides explorer and systray). Perhaps there's something in your startup group that you missed? Try msconfig in the run dialog box, click the Startup tab, and uncheck all those bastards.

 

[psykohog]

Also make sure your screensaver is off.

 

[sojin]

the default ms hd defrag is a dog... plus you got a 13 GB linear partition...

Oh, well, some people have a whole 60GB as one fatty32 partition... when r they gonna to defrag? that may take a life-span of a WDC hd...

get your self a copy of FixIt suite from Ontrack... it has sth called jet-defrag... much faster than MS defrag.exe... yet it would still take a few hours for your hd...

be sure to close/kill all processes other than explorer... ehhh, you may want to leave mdm running...

 

[Nitsuj]

It also depends on if you leave the option checked to rearrange your programs for better performance. Leaving it checked greatly extends the time it takes to defrag since it also rearranges your programs based on how often you boot each app.

 

[potz]

go get yourself a copy of norton utilities or systemworks (i saw a place selling it for free yeserday). speed disk is SOOO much faster than ms crap.

 

[Emory7]

Boot into safe mode...then run defrag.

 

[igiveup]

Well how big was your old HD? If its a 13gb disk it can't be the one you originally bought with the 133mhz processor. Your old HD will be so much faster than the new one because (let me guess a little here) you had anywhere from an 800mb to 2gb disk. There is just a lot less disk to physically scan there. So read and write performance can't help your new 13gb disk much here. MS Defrag tool is dog slow though. Nortons was at LEAST twice as fast.

 

[bolomite]

If your drive is not partitioned into smaller chunks, then there's the reason defrag is so slow.

 

[potz]

go buy yourself a copy of norton systemworks 2000 here...

Computer Surplus Outlet

it's $0.00 =)

 

[loosbrew]

i would have to guess that you had a screesaver on. either that or your disk is screwed in some way. no defrag takes days. my friend has 2 30 gigs in a raid0 config and takes him two hours to fully defrag a very fragged drive. do a very thorough scan disk and tell it to report any errors to you after its done. this might take a while, a few hours maybe? i would say turn off the screensavers, if any, and run the windows defrag. also the MHZ wont really affect your defrag speed, its your drive access read and wriet speeds that really matter. i can defrag my 15 gig maxtor in less than an hour in win2k using diskeeper.


loosbrew