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Fragmentation question

C

Craig234

Lifer
It's that time of the decade, so I ran Windows XP defrag on my 120GB hard drive. I even freed up 7gb to do it from the usual 500mb free.

My question is, I noticed when it finished the report said that there files with thousands of fragments that could not be de-fragments. World of Warcraft had a file with 24,000 fragments.

Can anyone explain that to me - is it normal, is it a big problem? What should I do if anything?

I do see my system go through mini-hangs, often with disk activity, for a few to 45 seconds.
 
Originally posted by: Craig234
It's that time of the decade, so I ran Windows XP defrag on my 120GB hard drive. I even freed up 7gb to do it from the usual 500mb free.

My question is, I noticed when it finished the report said that there files with thousands of fragments that could not be de-fragments. World of Warcraft had a file with 24,000 fragments.

Can anyone explain that to me - is it normal, is it a big problem? What should I do if anything?

I do see my system go through mini-hangs, often with disk activity, for a few to 45 seconds.
Click to expand...

You don't have enough free space to do a complete defrag. Windows needs 15% free space, and I prefer even more than that. To get more of it defragged you'll have to get more free space, and run defrag again.
 
What's the impact of having 7GB free instead of 18GB? Are there other defraggers I should consider that need less?

But I'm especially trying to get info on the impact of files with thousands of fragments, how concerned about that I should be for WoW performance, if they're related to 'mini-hangs'.
 
I think other defraggers can work with less free space, but I can't give recommendations as I use Windows exclusively. In general overly full hds don't seem to perform as well as drives with more freeboard. I can't give a logical reason for this, but that's been my experience.

Fragmentation can cause hitching in games, especially if the drive has to jump back and forth a good bit to get the files it needs. I guess you've run the disk cleanup wizard, and emptied the recycle bin to get extra space, right? If so the only thing left is to delete files or unused programs, or maybe try a different defragger. Even if you get your drive defragged though, I think your low amount of free space will still affect performance.
 
I have this mysterious lag that doesn't come in handy when playing a priest in WoW and you hang for 30 seconds in an instance battle. Even as I type this, my hard drive light just stays lit; when posting here with nothing but the browser running, I'll have these 2 to 10 second weird hangs just while typing, other times no hangs. I've run a spyware remover to check for that. Who knows... But 24,000 fragments in one file???
 
jkdefrag is supposedly good, and it is free.

I'd really try to get about 25% free disk space if you want the best reasonably possible defrag. in a reasonable amount of time / effort. 5% isn't enough at all.

Also sometimes it takes a couple of passes through defrag to get the best result. usually I drop to a command prompt and do two passes like this:
defrag c: -f -v
defrag c: -f -v

Also you can temporarily turn off hibernate support and reboot before defragging if it is on to get rid of a huge hiberfile.sys file while you defrag then you can turn it on again.

Similarly you can set the pagefile on your drive(s) to a zero or small size and reboot before defragging which will free up a lot of space which otherwise would be tied up in a non-defragmentable pagefile.sys file.
Of course you'll want to undo that when the defrag is done.


 
Originally posted by: Craig234
What's the impact of having 7GB free instead of 18GB? Are there other defraggers I should consider that need less?

But I'm especially trying to get info on the impact of files with thousands of fragments, how concerned about that I should be for WoW performance, if they're related to 'mini-hangs'.
Click to expand...

i've done a defrag with 5gb just takes longer
 
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