Has any one ever had any problems after defragmentation. Any real gains? I seem to remember PC World magazine saying that it was absolutely not needed.
Thanks
Thanks
Pros and Cons of Defragging hard drive.
- Thread starter Moffat Cafe
- Start date
Hi, Abe Lincoln once said "Believe nothing of what you read and only half of what you see." I think he was refering to PC World Magazine.
HannibalX
Diamond Member
- May 12, 2000
- 9,359
- 2
- 0
<--- IT Sys Admin
We have PCs down in our training rooms still running on their Win2k loads from Dec. 2000. I went down and defragged them the other day (all thirty of them). They ran significantly faster after being defragged.
Yes it does work. I think it's more noticeable on old, slow hardware.
On my PC at home with its 10k WD SATA drives I don't notice much difference after a defrag.
We have PCs down in our training rooms still running on their Win2k loads from Dec. 2000. I went down and defragged them the other day (all thirty of them). They ran significantly faster after being defragged.
Yes it does work. I think it's more noticeable on old, slow hardware.
On my PC at home with its 10k WD SATA drives I don't notice much difference after a defrag.
I think the only con would be if you accidentally deleted a file you needed from the Recycle Bin. If you defragged, data would be moved into that open spot keeping you from recovering the file in all likelyhood.
And yes, you should notice a decent speed increase on older to mid-range systems.
Other than that...Defrag your HD. Just my opinion...
And yes, you should notice a decent speed increase on older to mid-range systems.
Other than that...Defrag your HD. Just my opinion...
Is there a particular level of fragmentation where "symptoms" start to arise (a new slowness?)
Or is there a rule of thumb % fragmentation when I should always defrag?
And is there any danger (e.g. excessive hard drive wear) from frequent defragmentation (like every week or so)?
Or is there a rule of thumb % fragmentation when I should always defrag?
And is there any danger (e.g. excessive hard drive wear) from frequent defragmentation (like every week or so)?
I have programs that continuously defrag a hard drive. I have not had any problems for the 3 years I have owned the drive
Anything that causes more hard drive activity could result in an earlier failure, but once a week defrag isn't enough that you would be able to say that was the cause of a failure; the drive would have failed eventually anyway. Even doing a random read/write test continuously on the drive isn't actually going to cause a failure that wouldn't have happened eventually anyway.
Defragmentation applications have their own rules to determine when they suggest you defrag. They also all have their own ways of measuring "percentage" of fragmentation, since there is no single measurement. You've got the measurement of how many fragments each single file is broken into; how much empty space there is in between the fragments; how large the fragments are; how often a fragmented file gets modified; nowadays we also have the "is this a file that loads on bootup" issue used to optimize files for faster boot.
Generally, a once a week defrag is going to keep you within an optimal performance range, where you couldn't really say that a tiny performance difference is due to the fragmentation rather than a difference in what software you have running at the moment or what files are loaded or what the OS has cached. Even going a month will probably only be a small difference.
If you do a LOT of modifying of many files, and create and delete a lot of files, then fragmentation can become extensive in a short period. But you probably need to get up into the level of "100 users are constantly uploading, modifying and deleting files from my system" level before you'd run into that. A single user isn't likely to have such issues, just downloading music and movies and web browsing. Even the thousands of files of the Internet cache on your browser aren't likely to be the source of any real slowdown if they get fragmented (Internet access is still slower than a fragmented hard drive).
I usually do a system cleanup before defragging because a lot of those temporary files and restore points are the most fragmented files.
Saved more than 2 Gig of useless defragging last time.
Saved more than 2 Gig of useless defragging last time.
I actually defrag my comp once in awile I don't use the defragging software in windows though rather i use Diskeeper it's also significantly quicker it seems
It's not any better. They use the same engine in the end if you realize that. Moreover, using Diskeeper just slows your system down because it adds one more thing running in the background.
I used to use Diskeeper, but now it's all about optimizations so I'd rather not have a bunch of crap running. MS defrag ftw.
Edit: I defrag my Windows partition at least once a week, the Vista and Games partitions constitute another 140gb, but those rarely get touched and it's not like defragging is day and night for those partitions, and so Windows is the only one I keep well maintained.
If you defrag often, there's nothing wrong with MS utility because it shouldn't take that long. Worst case, just leave it on overnight.
I'll generally defrag my hard drive about every 3-4 weeks. It seems to do the trick. I might also defrag after installing a large game or the likes jsut to make sure that the hard drive is in the best condition it can be in. I've never experienced a problem, but excessive wear would be a reasonable thought on the negative effects of defragging a hard drive.
I disagree. While the windows defrag tool is made by the diskeeper corp. that does not mean they are on the same level. I believe it does do the job significantly quicker but it also defrags better. I found that the windows utility would sometimes have to be run multiple times to achieve a file structure free of fragments. Not the case with Diskeeper.
My favorite feature is the boot time defrag. A feature not available in the windows version. It condenses all folders to the beginning of the file structure and defrags files that normally can't be touched due to use by windows(paging file). This helps save from future fragmentation by making more continuous portions of the hard drive open for the larger files that most often become split up into pieces.
All that and you don't have to have the realtime defragmentor running if you don't wnat to. I just run it once a week and it helps keep my system zipping along quite nicely.
yeah I don't run it anymore actually, but it worked well when I did as it was set to do it only when the computer was idle.
Hi, Defrag does not alter anything it just moves it as is to another location. You will not lose anything on a normal defrag. I think Peter Norton wrote that one many years ago an did a real good job on it. I hope MS paid him well for it.
Luck, Jim
Luck, Jim
Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
to be honest i've never noticed a difference, even when i had a 486it was just something u were told to do...defrag and harddrive. so u would....
Did you barely use your computer? Or did you ever go for like a year without defragging where you really would see a difference?
I think it probably made less of a difference when files were so small they actually could often fit within a single cluster or maybe a few. Then you were mainly dealing with lots of free space, not necessarily fragmented files. But a 1MB file needs to use 32,768 clusters of 32K each.
i miss norton's speed disk or whatever it was called. that worked great. now when I defrag it doesn't seem to do much. the before and after picture are nearly the same for me (both windows and diskeeper)
- Mar 4, 2000
- 27,370
- 239
- 106
That is one of my main reasons for going with Raxco's Perfect Disk. The metaphor is very close to Norton's excellent Speed Disk.
P/D combines defrag with optimization - and it shows the area of your HDD staked as "off limits" by NTFS as their "MFT Reserved Zone." That means you don't have as much free space as you think you do in NTFS.
I have been defragging/optimizing for about 22 years now, and have never had a "con."
apart from being unable to recover accidently deleted data, there is no con. yes i do defrag. my rig isn't so new and i do notice a difference. i suppose maybe with NCQ it is less noticable. i do it.
Diskkeeper seems to be like the bare minimum, even though it should be doign a lot better job than the version in Windows.
PerfectDisk is fun, it's not quite as enjoyable as the Win9x defragger, or the similar Norton Speeddisk, but you get a much more detailed and easy to read map of the file layout, it can take up most of the screen instead of just being a horizontal graph, you see individual blocks so you can see them being moved around, though not as granularly as the old DOS or 9x defrag (gets harder to do guess as drive sizes go up).
Incidentally, all the current defraggers do actually use the Windows MoveFile API to move the files, so in a way they are all working the same way. But all it is is the API that lets them read and then write the file, they all still have their own algorithms and methods to determine placement. In 9x they all had to write their own code to actually access the drive to move the data (maybe this also has something to do with the lack of granularity in the drive maps).
TRENDING THREADS
-
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)- Started by DisEnchantment
- Replies: 24K
-
Discussion Intel Meteor, Arrow, Lunar & Panther Lakes Discussion Threads
- Started by Tigerick
- Replies: 19K
-
-
-
Facebook
Twitter