How often do you defrag your harddrive?

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vanderStoep

Senior member
Mar 1, 2000
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every two weeks or so.

Edit:
I see a lot of people writting "with 5% fragmentation" ??? How do you see how much your hdd is fragmented?
 

billandopus

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 1999
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Another vote for Vopt99. I defrag before every burn which is probably unnecessary and maybe when it goes above 6-9 percent.
 

Topochicho

Senior member
Mar 31, 2000
338
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create a seperate partition for you pagefile to run on and set your max/min to the size of the partition and defrag becomes almost useless. All you might want to do is defrag fat16/32 disk when it gets super screwed, but not really important. NTFS drives won't ever need it... you'll upgrade to the next windows before it'll need it.

PS the seperate partion for pagefile needs to be a fat 16/32 drive. NTFS puts all it overhead right in the middle of the disk , which would cut your pagefile into 2 parts. Fat 16/32 puts it at the beginning leaveing your pagefile as one continuos unfragmented and speedy file.
 

Syborg1211

Diamond Member
Jul 29, 2000
3,297
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i just defragmented my hard drive and see no difference and got no difference in performance
 

beat mania

Platinum Member
Jan 23, 2000
2,451
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76
never. well, I used to when I had dinky 80mb hd. now I have > 200gb of space it'll take quite a while to do. so I don't.
 

Lokan

Senior member
Mar 8, 2000
305
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Hah, this thread made me go defrag, my primary 15 gig HD was 79% fragmented!! Needless to say it had been 6 months or so. Oh well, Speed disk fixed that. :)
 

Dan

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
5,080
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C partition (where the OS is) usually gets defragged once/week.

Other partitions (D-F) usually get defragged once/month.
 

osage

Diamond Member
Jul 16, 2000
5,686
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Sharkeeper, tell me about restoring and image, what is that, and how is it done?? Is this something you use Ghost or some other software to do? thanks
I defrag about every 2 weeks or so
 

Charay

Member
Aug 16, 2000
50
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"defragging mah hard drive for thrills" from weird al and "it's all about the pentiums" LOL
i have no life so i perform one weekly.
 

dawks

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
5,071
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once a month. but I try to put it off as long as possible. I need as many cycles for rc5 as I can get!!

:D :D :D :D
 

jinsonxu

Golden Member
Aug 19, 2000
1,370
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I'm thinking of using Win2K. Is NTFS faster than FAT32? Why doesn't it require to be defragged as often as FAT16/32?
 

Topochicho

Senior member
Mar 31, 2000
338
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Its not a speed thing, its stability. The NTFS system is much more robust. It also manages itself better than the fat systems. The problem with NTFS is that it can't be read by the 95/98 platforms and win2k just runs too damn slow for games. Fat 32 is reasonably stable, but it doesn't manage itself well and tends to fragment badly. Problem is that NT4.0 doesn't read fat32. Fat 16 is a POS and eats up space while being extremely unstable.
 

JaiKnight

Senior member
Feb 6, 2000
958
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vanderStoep and Syborg1211: From what I can tell you only find out how much your HD is fragmented when you startup the Defrag. After the initial check of your HD it'll tell you how much your HD is fragmented and ask if you want to continue, I think if it's really bad it'll just go ahead without asking, I'm not sure though...

BTW: Defragging big drives sucks :( Is SpeedDisk really that much faster? I might have to try that...
 

Senior Member

Senior member
Dec 17, 1999
381
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JaiKnight: Yes, Norton Utilities SpeedDisk is great; many times faster than Win defrag. Norton Systemworks 2000 is a great set of utilities if you do a custom install and do not let any of the progs run at startup. (Don't use CrashGuard at all, of course.)
 

Syborg1211

Diamond Member
Jul 29, 2000
3,297
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very funny minihoser

windows 98se is not telling me how much my hard drive is fragmented, just defragged and it didn't ask. Just tried to defrag again and it didn't ask or say anything either.
 

Lokan

Senior member
Mar 8, 2000
305
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Syborg, Win98's doesn't tell you when you start it automatically, but Norton's Speeddisk does. To find out an approximation of the HD's status, just run the defrag and look at the graphical representation of the HD. All the white blocks are free space on the HD that the defrag program will "condense" so that the HD doesn't have to search all over the drive to find info.