How often should one Defrag..??

[NumbaJuan]

?

 

[TheOmegaCode]

How often does one move files around?

Just don't defrag at a LAN, bad things happen.

 

[adlep]

Nice to see you Thomas!
Make sure to use Vopt XP. This program replaces MS defragmenting utility and it IS much better and faster...
Good software
here
Make sure to give it a try!
It actually does make a diffrience in overall performance of the system

 

[spyordie007]

yes, if you do things that create large very fragmented files often (say ripping and encoding a couple-hundred CDs to MP3) than you are going to want to run a defrag often.

if all you use the machine for is little stuff (say browsing the web and MS office) than I'd say less than once a year.

-Spy

EDIT: forgot to mention, the easiest way to find out if you need it is to run defrag and do an "analyse", it does an okay enough job of telling you if you need to.

 

[Nothinman]

Generally defragging does very little for performance. Most file access isn't anywhere near sequential so the OS ends up doing tons of seeking around the disk whether the files are contiguous or not. For instance, when you run an executable the OS sets up a VM space for that process and maps that executable into that memory space along with any dlls it needs, but none of the files are actually read until they're accessed. So when you finally do get around to running parts of that program they're paged into memory as they're needed in chunks here and there.

You may notice a problem with things like video or audio editing that require a certain level of responsiveness, meaning if the OS can't get parts of the file into memory in under 10ms the app studders or loses A/V sync. For that you would want a dedicated partition, so you can format it before you put those files on it, it's much quicker to do that than to defrag the partition all the time after edits. And you would want a completely seperate drive since you don't want the OS doing other things to affect that partitions responsiveness.

 

[NumbaJuan]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Generally defragging does very little for performance. Most file access isn't anywhere near sequential so the OS ends up doing tons of seeking around the disk whether the files are contiguous or not. For instance, when you run an executable the OS sets up a VM space for that process and maps that executable into that memory space along with any dlls it needs, but none of the files are actually read until they're accessed. So when you finally do get around to running parts of that program they're paged into memory as they're needed in chunks here and there.

You may notice a problem with things like video or audio editing that require a certain level of responsiveness, meaning if the OS can't get parts of the file into memory in under 10ms the app studders or loses A/V sync. For that you would want a dedicated partition, so you can format it before you put those files on it, it's much quicker to do that than to defrag the partition all the time after edits. And you would want a completely seperate drive since you don't want the OS doing other things to affect that partitions responsiveness.

Thanks for the info. Quick question.

Lets say I use Musicmatch to rip cd?s and play all my Mp3 files. Would it be better to install Musicmatch on a separate partition away from the OS or a completely different drive?

 

[Nothinman]

It would probably be more beneficial to seperate the MP3s, not the apps. Despite all the paging and seeking needed to start an application and supporting dlls it doesn't take long at all for a few reasons (OS read-ahead, some drives even do read-ahead on their own if they have a lot of cache to save seeks) so the app will probably be fully in memory after less than a few seconds. And any MP3 player with using will do atleast a few seconds of buffering so that any lag in reading the MP3s won't cause skips. If you don't have much memory it may get evicted back to disk when there's memory pressure and that can cause problems, but that's a whole other scenario.

It's also better to seperate the data from the OS incase of problems, you don't have to worry about losing your MP3s if you need to format and reinstall if they're on a different drive.

 

[NumbaJuan]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
It would probably be more beneficial to seperate the MP3s, not the apps. Despite all the paging and seeking needed to start an application and supporting dlls it doesn't take long at all for a few reasons (OS read-ahead, some drives even do read-ahead on their own if they have a lot of cache to save seeks) so the app will probably be fully in memory after less than a few seconds. And any MP3 player with using will do atleast a few seconds of buffering so that any lag in reading the MP3s won't cause skips. If you don't have much memory it may get evicted back to disk when there's memory pressure and that can cause problems, but that's a whole other scenario.

It's also better to seperate the data from the OS incase of problems, you don't have to worry about losing your MP3s if you need to format and reinstall if they're on a different drive.

Thanks

 

[toant103]

every month

 

[StraightPipe]

I've got task scheduler set to defrag weekly and scandisk monthly

I dont thinks it matters much as long as you do it monthly, but it depends on how much/and what you use your pc.

 

[dpopiz]

what's your opinion about what the ultimate defragger is? I have diskeeper 6.0, but is there something better? I saw somebody mention another one in the first few posts of this thread.

 

[adlep]

I saw somebody mention another one in the first few posts of this thread.

You talking to me?
Hugh?
You talking to me?
....
Seriously though, Vopt XP is a good program, just try it and judge for yourself..
Thre is a 30 day, fully featured version of the program available for free in the link I have provided...

 

[dbwillis]

I run defrag on Tuesdays and Fridays, it takes Diskeeper about 3 minutes to do on my 120gb drive

 

[lowtech1]

I rarely defrag, even on an Win9.x machine, because the perfromance isn't enought to warrant it. However I format & reimage my drive about once a year.

 

[Spyro]

Originally posted by: dbwillis
I run defrag on Tuesdays and Fridays, it takes Diskeeper about 3 minutes to do on my 120gb drive

:Q