Is Win7 ultimate 64 bit defrager a good program?

[Northern Lawn]

I've been under the assumption windows defrager were crap and would take forever but the last time I looked into them I only had 1 300 gig HD and was using..XP I think. But now with win7 and 4 1 terabyte HDs, the defrager, which defaulted on Wednesday mourning, seems to work well and fast... or maybe it's not working at all. I thought I would ask.

 

[Mem]

Most users are happy with the built-in one in Win7 ,however I use Defraggler (which is free)from the makers of CCleaner ,you can get it here http://www.piriform.com/defraggler.

It's really a personal choice when it comes to choosing and using a defrag program.

 

[tdawg]

I believe starting with Vista, windows automatically defrags your hard drive(s) whenever your computer is idle, no scheduling needed. I personally haven't seen the need for a 3rd party defrag program.

 

[Nothinman]

Defragging is akin to eating organic foods. Any perceived differences are almost always just a placebo affect.

 

[43st]

Defragging is akin to eating organic foods. Any perceived differences are almost always just a placebo affect.

Defragging a hard drive is important, but it's highly dependent on what type of work you are doing. If you just use the internet then you probably don't need to defrag your drive.

Same goes for organic food.. if your diet is made up of mcnuggets and coke then any difference in an organic food item isn't going to concern you.

 

[Nothinman]

Defragging a hard drive is important, but it's highly dependent on what type of work you are doing. If you just use the internet then you probably don't need to defrag your drive.

Same goes for organic food.. if your diet is made up of mcnuggets and coke then any difference in an organic food item isn't going to concern you.

Except that it's not important. I've had this conversation with dozens of people and no one has been able to actually prove that defragging helps anything. They always just come back with "But it feels faster!" as if their placebo affects mean something.

And I'd wager the same thing goes for organic food. It's more religion than science.

 

[lxskllr]

Except that it's not important. I've had this conversation with dozens of people and no one has been able to actually prove that defragging helps anything. They always just come back with "But it feels faster!" as if their placebo affects mean something.

And I'd wager the same thing goes for organic food. It's more religion than science.

I'm with you to a point. I've had horribly fragmented machines that ran like crap(just about solid red in the Windows defragmenter) which were improved by defragmenting, but with even light maintenance I don't notice any difference, and it's certainly not worth using a 3rd party defrag. When I was on XP, I'd defrag every few months, and I never saw a performance improvement. Vista defrags every week by default. That's a bit too often imo, but I can't be bothered to change it since it doesn't affect my use of the computer.

 

[Nothinman]

I'm with you to a point. I've had horribly fragmented machines that ran like crap(just about solid red in the Windows defragmenter) which were improved by defragmenting, but with even light maintenance I don't notice any difference, and it's certainly not worth using a 3rd party defrag. When I was on XP, I'd defrag every few months, and I never saw a performance improvement. Vista defrags every week by default. That's a bit too often imo, but I can't be bothered to change it since it doesn't affect my use of the computer.

Yea, exactly. It can help in some extreme situations but those are the exception, not the rule.

 

[sourceninja]

I'm not a fan of defragging, in fact I never personally do it. However, I have a few friends with macs, and for some reason (this never happens to my mac) their macs get slow. I mean noticeably slow. Application loading times, response times, and boot times. You can just hear the drive grinding away.

But if I take their computer, and I clone their drive over to a fireware/usb drive, then clone it back (say with carbon copy cloner) the speed issues go away. We even replaced the drive in one of my friends computers (well upgraded it to 500 gig) and it didn't make one bit of difference.

The only thing I can think of is that my friends frequently deal with large files and copy/create/move them a lot. OSX defags small files itself, but it ignores large files. Either that or they all have bad hard disks.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I find since win2k the windows defragger is very good. Though I do miss the win98 one, it was fun watching all the blocks move. But that's probably what made it take so long lol. Had to process all of that.

I find it's also less sensitive to hard drive activity. I defrag my windows server live every now and then and no issues. I suppose it just skips anything in use and moves on.

Defragging can help speed up disk access in some cases so it does not hurt to do it if you find your drive is thrashing all the time due to fragmentation. This is more an issue with drives that are almost full though.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Yea, exactly. It can help in some extreme situations but those are the exception, not the rule.

I disagree. While I don't have any numbers to back my statement up (and I'm not going to fragment the crap out of my hard drive), given a magnetic disk, fragmentation can make for a huge difference on access times and in-order transfer rates.

Think about the queuing algorithm in the HDD Controller. If the data is always on the other side of the disc (or God-forbid, on a separate platter) you have to attempt to fill requests on the path to the specific sector. If a request isn't on that path, you then have to generate a completely new request.

The head is flying all around the platters trying to find the data in a timely, yet efficient manner. Access times with a highly fragmented HDD are through the roof.

Furthermore, the in order transfer rates would decrease as well because nothing is "in-order" anymore. Of course, given a sufficiently large HDD cache, you may only see the access time penalty as the HDD will buffer all the data it receives to the cache before a burst transfer.

-Kevin

Edit: I would; however, like to say that with SSD, fragmentation has 0 affect on performance. In fact, due to wear leveling algorithms, your HDD is probably fragmented as much as possible.

 

[Binky]

Some people freak out when their CPU is over 40C. Some people like to defrag hourly. I've seen people who are soothed while watching the defrag map rearrange itself. Sugar pill or truly valuable? Meh, I don't know.

This one is free:
http://www.puransoftware.com/Puran-Defrag.html

I would never pay for a defrag utility. There are too many free versions out there (including the MS version) that work well. The exception is WHS - the built in defragger can kill it. Somehow this just seems idiotic.

 

[Nothinman]

I disagree. While I don't have any numbers to back my statement up (and I'm not going to fragment the crap out of my hard drive), given a magnetic disk, fragmentation can make for a huge difference on access times and in-order transfer rates.

Which is what everyone says, including the unwilling to part about being unwilling to actually prove it.

The head is flying all around the platters trying to find the data in a timely, yet efficient manner. Access times with a highly fragmented HDD are through the roof.

Maybe, it depends on your usage patterns. The way demand paging works in modern OSes means that you're seeking between dozens or hundreds of files already. And because that's already the case OSes already prefetch more than the request asked for to avoid just that. And with a good I/O elevator the requests will be sorted and merged as best as possible before even getting submitted to the controller.

 

[Rifter]

Defragging is highly over rated, i ran HD Tune pro on a 500GB drive that was 15% fragmented(that was all i could get it up to before getting tired of deliberatly trying to fragment the drive) and it tested out less than .05% slower than at 0% fragmentation. And considering the time and effort it took me to get that drive to 15% fragmentation let me tell you a normal user will NEVER get there drive that fragmented.

 

[hclarkjr]

pulls up lawn chair and gets popcorn out

 

[Liquidfluidity]

Isn't the quickest path the one with least resistance? If you take a finished puzzle , you can draw a straight line through it - but start taking parts out of it and the path changes and gets longer. I'm a maintenance freak(use about 6 maintenance apps) and that's just how I look at it. I deal with a lot of large files and moving them around so I do see differences when I defrag.

 

[Nothinman]

Isn't the quickest path the one with least resistance?

If only it were that simple.

 

[zerocool84]

I defrag once a month or after I install a new game. I use a 3rd party defragger called Defraggler and it does it fast. Just run it while I'm taking a crap. I don't notice a difference otherwise but I'm sure if you've had a drive for a long time and never been defragged it might help.

 

[Emulex]

contig.exe with power defragmenter gui - extremely lightweight and precise. not as good as the fancy stuff but if you want to defrag your outlook pst dir - it will do just that or if you want to defrag your outlook.pst - it will do that.

its goal isn't perfection of the entire filesystem but rather the files

 

[hclarkjr]

wow, i am shocked nobody has mentioned diskeeper yet. that is what i use. keeps the drives defragged on the fly.

 

[Liquidfluidity]

I have also heard that O&O Defrag is good , too.

 

[Emulex]

yeah if you load them all up you should be set.

vista and win7 defaults to weekly defrag (win7 turns this off for an SSD but may not sometimes! best to check)

 

[Engineer]

I like Auslogics free.

 

[Billb2]

If you want to hurt yourself with a defragger with the most options try Untimate Defrag.

 

[Nothinman]

wow, i am shocked nobody has mentioned diskeeper yet. that is what i use. keeps the drives defragged on the fly.

Probably because the included defragger has been based on Diskeeper for years and since it automatically runs in the background starting with Vista there's no reason to buy one.