Third party defragmenter wearing out drive?

[nabeels]

Is it possible for it to happen?

I'm using Diskeeper, and for some reason my drive takes a long time to bootup. Granted, it's a laptop, and does have alot of programs booting up with it..that could be the reason..but it's not my question.

Would regular defragmenting degrade driver performance in the long run? And maybe more-so by a third party defragmenter?

Thanks
-Nabeel

 

[Cerb]

No, laptop HDDs are just slow.
Hibernate as often as possible

 

[nabeels]

I've run PCMark, it gets a higher score than my 7200rpm desktop. I usually leave my laptop on anywho.

But my question was if defragmenting can lead to degradationg of HD performance.

 

[SneakyStuff]

Regular defragging from windows will not hurt your HD, I do mine every month. You just need to realize, notebook HDs get hot, they're not as fast as desktop hds.

 

[nabeels]

The temp is ~35deg.

I defrag about 2-3 times a week..

 

[InlineFive]

Your drive is slow. It's not a problem.

 

[EeyoreX]

The answer is still no, defragging will not damage your hard drive any more than just using it will. Why do you defrag so often? To be honest, I defrag every 6 months (if I remember) and I notice no difference when I do anyhow. Even if there is a difference, 2-3 times per week seems excessive to me. Though it still won't degrade your drives performance.

\Dan

 

[nabeels]

Well I just put it on if I'm leaving my comp for a bit, just a habit.

Diskeeper always gives a certain percentage improvement after defragmentation, though its accuracy doesn't seem to be close.

Thanks guys.

 

[GfW]

The newest Diskeeper will defrag continuously if you set it to do so ... using it at work for about 4 months now and the HD never gets very defragmented.

 

[nabeels]

Yeah, but I don't want it to take up resources, or be defragging while I'm playing a game or something.

 

[thatsright]

Well I dunno there nabeels, maybe you can do a bit more to help. Have you tried bootvis? This is a program from Microsoft, though no longer supported that will analyze your boot up and show you where the delay is. Then you can run the 'optimize' feature, and it will load up your PC/laptop. Google it, and you'll find it.

I just worked on my sisters Dell Inspirion 8200 laptop. It has 256MB Ram/1.6G P4 mobile processor and XP Home. First I used Diskeeper to defrag it, and then Bootvis. Her original boot time was 38.73 seconds, after it was down to 26.04 seconds.

Just a thought.

 

[nabeels]

I'll use it to analyze, I'm scared to use it..

I tried it on my desktop a while ago, completely messed it up. It booted quickly, but everything else ran really slow. I'll check it out to analyze though. Thanks for reminding me about that.

 

[CQuinn]

Regular defragging can actually help a hard drive. By setting a more contiguous file layout,
less work has to be done by the drive to read and write files.

2-3 times per week seems excessive to me.

That is actually a good schedule to set for medium to high usage systems.
Most third party defraggers will try to set up an automatic schedule of at least
once a week; and Diskeeper has a smart schedule feature, which tries to defrag
during periods when the system is idle or not in use.

The more often you defrag, the less fragmented files are found that the defrag
program has to work on, so subsequent defrags should take much less time that
the first and second times.

The idea is not to see a performance boost from defragging, it is to not take a
performance hit from not defragging and letting the files become mixed up in
the file system.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: CQuinn
Regular defragging can actually help a hard drive. By setting a more contiguous file layout,
less work has to be done by the drive to read and write files.

2-3 times per week seems excessive to me.

That is actually a good schedule to set for medium to high usage systems.
Most third party defraggers will try to set up an automatic schedule of at least
once a week; and Diskeeper has a smart schedule feature, which tries to defrag
during periods when the system is idle or not in use.

The more often you defrag, the less fragmented files are found that the defrag
program has to work on, so subsequent defrags should take much less time that
the first and second times.

The idea is not to see a performance boost from defragging, it is to not take a
performance hit from not defragging and letting the files become mixed up in
the file system.

I don't personally defrag all that often, perhaps only 6 omnths or so. However, I defrag such that all free space is contigous, which means that basically most of the entire data on the HD has to shift over, along with the actual out-of-order fragmented file clusters that have to be swapped to the "back of the line" and then wait their turn to be put back into place.

That's a lot of work, and it can also tend to raise drive temps a lot, if not properly cooled. In fact defragmenting could even be a risk to the data on the drive in those cases, which is why I prefer to defrag manually, in order to keep an eye on things, and why I really wish that XP had a simple GUI switch to disable background defrag. (Besides the "sudden lag during a game" issue.)

But the most important property of a defragmented filesystem isn't performance, it's recovery. Data-recovery on files that are themselves in contiguous clusters, is largely trivial, and can be accomplished even by scanning the clusters of the drive "raw", even without a FAT or MFT index table. However, if the FAT/MFT gets damaged significantly, then whether files can be recovered at all can become a critical question that hinges on whether they are fragmented or not.

One thing that I really wish that most Windows' systems implemented, to reduce fragmentation, is something akin to *nix system's \var partition. Some seperate area of the disk for rapidly-modified data and temp files to reside.