To defrag or not?

[Cienja]

I build me a new system about once per year, so I haven't put much thought into the advantages of defragging. Is it a big enough boost to performance that I should and if so, how often?

 

[Blain]

On my HTPC I'm deleting and adding HUGE files all the time.
I usually defrag about once a week with heavy use.

 

[Billb2]

Most defraqggers will let you look at how fragmented your drive is.
After you check a few times, you'll come up with your own schedule.
And it will be quite a bit more often than once a year!

 

[ilkhan]

vista/7 auto defrag weekly if you leave them on. just like auto-updates its run at night.

 

[WildHawg]

Defragmentation should be done on a regular basis (1 to 2 times monthly) as well as cleaning out your temp and internet temp files prior to defraging. This will keep your system in optimal running condition and help avert any little errors.

 

[taltamir]

never ever defrag

 

[Russwinters]

Defragmenting a hard drive will make a large difference if you are constantly adding and removing programs and files from your computer.



The reason is that when you delete small things like mp3s, and pictures it leaves small little spaces in between your other larger files.


When you go to install a new game, it will actually fill the gaps with some of the data from that game, and so now you hard drive has to perform whats called "Butterfly operations" to get to those sectors.


Butterfly operations are when the hard drive is working its hardest, where it has to fly much further physically to read files that are fragmented all over the disk surface. Not only does the reduce the performance greatly due to the fact that games primarily utilize random seek operations; the further the heads must travel from sector to sector the longer it is going to take to read all the sectors needed to give you that file. If all of the files are in physical close proximity of each other this will reduce your random accesstime thus improving your gaming and application performance.

To make things worse, a drive the is constantly performing heavy butterfly operations is at higher risk of failures such as a head crash. A head crash is when the heads actually physically crash into the disk surface, causing damage to both the heads, and the sectors in the crash zone. The manufacturers have plenty of safeguards that try to help, but most of them fall short of really doing any good.

So there you have it, defrag often everyone!


Phew. thats a mouth full.

 

[taltamir]

so much bad info...
Head crashing does not happen due to "butterfly operation", it happens due to a shock to the drive, such as dropping the computer while it is running. how much your heads move is irrelevant to it.

A defragged drive will be slightly faster, but DURING defragging the drive will be amazingly slower for many hours.

defragging wastes electricity as your CPU and HDD have to work at higher than normal levels.

HDDs don't fly.

Games primarily use SEQUENTIAL operations, not random ones. Specifically, reading lots of textures.

PS. never heard the term butterfly operation before, and wikipedia does not have it either... I am inclined to beleive you made it up on the spot

 

[Modelworks]

Don't delete anything and you don't really have anything to worry about
I like wincontig.
The program is only 300KB or so, installs nothing, and lets you pick a folder or file to defrag. I do it for files like games or videos but not for things that change often.
http://wincontig.mdtzone.it/en/index.htm

 

[RebateMonger]

I don't normally bother with degrags. But if a disk has been "overflowed" or been almost full, considerable fragmentation can occur.

I recently had a client overflow their System drive in an SBS 2003 server. They had 0.00 MB of free space. I cleared 2.5 GB of space on the 12 GB disk and defragmented. I'd hoped that might fix their problem of EXTREMELY slow function of their brand-new PeachTree Accounting installation.

Unfortunately, it didn't help at all.

 

[RiDE]

Originally posted by: Russwinters
Defragmenting a hard drive will make a large difference if you are constantly adding and removing programs and files from your computer.



The reason is that when you delete small things like mp3s, and pictures it leaves small little spaces in between your other larger files.


When you go to install a new game, it will actually fill the gaps with some of the data from that game, and so now you hard drive has to perform whats called "Butterfly operations" to get to those sectors.


Butterfly operations are when the hard drive is working its hardest, where it has to fly much further physically to read files that are fragmented all over the disk surface. Not only does the reduce the performance greatly due to the fact that games primarily utilize random seek operations; the further the heads must travel from sector to sector the longer it is going to take to read all the sectors needed to give you that file. If all of the files are in physical close proximity of each other this will reduce your random accesstime thus improving your gaming and application performance.

To make things worse, a drive the is constantly performing heavy butterfly operations is at higher risk of failures such as a head crash. A head crash is when the heads actually physically crash into the disk surface, causing damage to both the heads, and the sectors in the crash zone. The manufacturers have plenty of safeguards that try to help, but most of them fall short of really doing any good.

So there you have it, defrag often everyone!


Phew. thats a mouth full.

Thanks for the info.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: taltamir
never ever defrag

same here. waste of time.

 

[Soundmanred]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

Originally posted by: taltamir
never ever defrag

same here. waste of time.

:thumbsup:

 

[Emulex]

serious waste of time on vista and win7 since it does this for you by default lol.

no if you have a crap disk controller its not a bad way of preventing stale bits; ie it will pick up weak sectors and realloc them while you are sleeping rather than having to deal with it when you are using the pc.

same with AV scanning nightly.

high end raid controllers will start sweeping drives looking for bad sectors after about 3 seconds of idle time. very smart indeed.

 

[F1shF4t]

Waste of time unless its your OS drive/partition.

 

[Billb2]

Disk Defragmentation ? Background and Engineering the Windows 7 Improvements

 

[Old Hippie]

I always liked it and could definately notice an increase in response after a defrag.

And I'm sure this is gonna be frowned upon but I use Diskeeper's HyperFast on my G1 once in awhile.

Definately heresy!

 

[Blain]

I add and delete huge 2-8GB files on my HTPC constantly.
My drive shows up as heavily fragmented from time to time, due the the file rotation going on daily.
Do you gurus suggest that I just ignore this fragmentation and let it go?

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Old Hippie
I always liked it and could definately notice an increase in response after a defrag.

Me too, but only on my spindle-based drives.

Originally posted by: Old Hippie
And I'm sure this is gonna be frowned upon but I use Diskeeper's HyperFast on my G1 once in awhile.

Definately heresy!

I'm only going to admit this once, but I too intermittently run diskeeper on my iram and ramdisk drives knowing full-well that doing so provides me absolutely zero performance improvements but I just like to see how freaking fast stuff moves around on those drives. (and my semi-OCD persona likes to see a nice and cleanly defraged diskeeper image of my harddrives)

That said, diskeeper so royally pissed me off with their 2009 upgrade crap (bought diskeeper 2008 something like 17 days before 2009 was released but they refused to upgrade me to 2009 without paying the full $60 upgrade fee, after being a diskeeper customer for a decade, rot in hell) so I CAN NOT wait to fully migrate to SSD-based rig where I will suffer zero performance issues by not having diskeeper installed ever again.

 

[Old Hippie]

Do you gurus suggest that I just ignore this fragmentation and let it go?

I like defrag and it definately made a difference I can notice on an OS drive but I've never used it on a large storage type drive.

If I were in your shoes, or clogs in my case, I probably wouldn't screw with it.

 

[Old Hippie]

I'm only going to admit this once, but I too intermittently run diskeeper on my iram and ramdisk drives

The confessional is open and it's not even Sunday! :laugh:

I'm not really sure how this SSD HyperFast works but I didn't know you could use the regular Diskeeper defrag on IRam or RamDisk stuff.

Learn something new every day....that's enough for today.

 

[Nothinman]

My drive shows up as heavily fragmented from time to time, due the the file rotation going on daily.
Do you gurus suggest that I just ignore this fragmentation and let it go?

So? Is there a real, noticable performance difference? Chances are that there's not so you're not really ignoring anything.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

My drive shows up as heavily fragmented from time to time, due the the file rotation going on daily.
Do you gurus suggest that I just ignore this fragmentation and let it go?

So? Is there a real, noticable performance difference? Chances are that there's not so you're not really ignoring anything.

Yeah for large files defragmentation is not really so much an issue, up to a point obviously.

I'm sure studies have been done that reduce fragmentation impact to something which involves a normalized fragmentation metric like fragments/MB of a given file.

For example having a 10MB file fragmented in 10 locations is probably statistically equivalent to having a 100MB fragmented in 100 locations when it comes to the performance impact of having that file fragmented.

Having a 2GB file fragmented in five or six places is probably not giving you any grief during the reading/copying/moving of that file, your drive's bandwidth is though.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Old Hippie
I always liked it and could definately notice an increase in response after a defrag.

And I'm sure this is gonna be frowned upon but I use Diskeeper's HyperFast on my G1 once in awhile.

Definately heresy!

you use a defragger on an SSD? and you think it helps?

 

[Blain]

One thing to keep in mind with HTPC HDs, is that they may be in the process of reading and writing at the same time...
Watching a recorded program at the same time as another program is being recorded.