To defrag or not?

[taltamir]

still... the amount of times you will install that patch in your entire lifetime in the single digits. Spending minutes to save seconds per install is not worth it.

But if you are a webserver that needs to send this file to millions of people, than defragging it will be a very good idea.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: taltamir
irrelevent. the exact same thing applies. Nobody defragments their warhammer patch before installing it. It is a simple process of download-install-delete.
Defragmenting it is stupid

If you knew what you were talking about you would know that those patch programs move parts of the original file, then add patched data, move another part, patch the data and it continues . Fragmenting the contents.

Other games download via torrents straight to the game directory without ever installing. You just click the desktop icon without ever running a typical installer.
The game updates in a similar way.

 

[taltamir]

why should I know about it? you refused to even tell me what game you are talking about until pressed, and I do not play warhammer.
So you were talking about games that run a special torrent, don't preallocate space, download individual files and then use those to replace existing ones using a move command that fragments the game. Fine, then there ARE extremely badly designed game updaters out there (they could have easily made a copy of each file and moved it, consolidating the space).

 

[bruceb]

I run defrag (Diskeeper 9 Pro) after any program is installed or removed. Same for after Windows updates.

 

[Russwinters]

I am not sure what makes you think that fragmentation doesn't slow down your access times....

Wrong information? Hard drives are my profession, this is what I do minimum 8 hours a day five days a week; I think I might know something about hard drives.

kind of wrote my answers out of the order that taltamir made his points, but here are my "counter points"

I really am just trying to help, and make sure the correct information is getting to people.


1) A Drive having to perform many butterfly operations can absolutely leads to heads crashes, I see a few drives a month whos heads crashed/died during defragmentation; especially of a drive that had huge levels of fragmentation (40% plus)


2) Games should read sequentially, but if you have already been using your dive for some time, and have loaded/unloaded files and game, and don't defragment your drive then that game may be loaded across the hard drive in multiple locations because there was not a large enough area of contigious free space to use. Obviosly this is still a "sequential read" but the sequential read now adds butterfly operations because it must jump x amount of sectors to continue reading game files.

butterfly operations = increased access time no matter what kind of read operation is occuring, it takes time for the heads to physically fly to a new sector location if the files it is wanting to read arn't written 100% contigiously. There is also alot going on under the hood that you may not be aware of that make butterfly operation take even longer; do you really think the heads are able to first try move to EXACTLY the right sector? Nope. They basically make an educated guess, and then use the servo signals to location the correct track, then must reach track following, then they are ready to read sectors, this all happens in nano/miliseconds, but it can still slow down performance.



3) Why would you defrag a drive while you are playing a game? Of course it's going to go REALLY slow. This is why you defrag overnight/while your away from your PC. It really doesn't take that long to do, unless you don't do it frequently like you are supposed to.


4)Butterfly operations refer to the "butterfly mode" of the hard drive.

here is some light reading: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003MSSP...17..955L

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/...servo%20mechanics.html

Slide 7 refers to butterfly mode, and gives a neat little graph to!

side note: Wikipedia isn't the source of all information. It is written by people like us. Butterfly mode is a industry term, and likely no one in the HDD industry has taken the time to care about writing an explanation on wikipedia.


5) Defragging wastes electricity. I am not sure why this is relevant. With this reasoning basically anything you do wastes electricity. Dont play crysis everyone! Your wasting electricity! Defragging uses minimal amount of CPU cycles; although it does work the hard drive out (this varies on the level of fragmentation) Lucky for us hard drives only consume 10-15 watts of power; not really going to effect your power bill more then a penny or two.

 

[taltamir]

Wrong information? Hard drives are my profession, this is what I do minimum 8 hours a day five days a week; I think I might know something about hard drives.

if that was the case, calling tech support would be useful... it is LEARNING that makes you knowledgeable... working means disbursing information you already know without having time to expand your knowledge... unless you spend some extra time learning on job or in your free time

 

[Russwinters]

Data recovery is my profession; Data recovery is what a good friend of mine refers to as "A type of Computer Fringe Science"


Basically....there is no school for data recovery; it is all self learning, and you never quit. When I am working I am learning constantly, while I am getting paid. That is actually a rule in my company; If you did not learn something today, then you must not have been working.

Theres really no one to go to when you get a brand new 1TB WD on your desk that is clicking. It is up to you to get the data back; even if it is a problem you have not seen ever before.

 

[taltamir]

I am not sure what makes you think that fragmentation doesn't slow down your access times....

look up the word significantly

I see a few drives a month whos heads crashed/died during defragmentation;

Yes, defragmenting shortens your drive's lifespan, that is why you shouldn't do it. way to go proving my point

5) Defragging wastes electricity. I am not sure why this is relevant. With this reasoning basically anything you do wastes electricity. Dont play crysis everyone! Your wasting electricity! Defragging uses minimal amount of CPU cycles;

1. Electricity costs money
2. The CPU is not the only electricity consuming device in the computer
3.

This is why you defrag overnight

you yourself said to leave your computer on all night so it can defrag... if you are leaving your computer on when not using it to defrag, then you are wasting a ton of electricity and money.
If you turn it off when not in use, then you are going to defrag while working...
if you set a schedule, it will end up defragging while you work... unless you schedule it for night and leave it on all night
if you do not set a schedule, you need to manually defrag all the time.

 

[taltamir]

PS. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND the use of ANTI FRAGMENTATION PRACTICES... that is, prevent fragmentation from ever occuring... this means preallocating your torrent files, etc.
It is constant defragmenting that is bad... especially with sub par defragmenters (anything other than windows vista / 7 defragger) which consider any file in two parts as fragmented, instead of looking at size of continous chunks. Moving 900MB of data because a 1GB file was in two pieces (100MB and 900MB) is stupid... a 1MB file that is accessed often that is in 250 pieces should be consolidated...however a 1MB file would not be split all over the place anyways except in extreme situations

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Russwinters
Basically....there is no school for data recovery

school? school TESTS you, often, for having learned the material yourself by reading about it or experimentation... good luck learning enough to do a job just by showing up to class...

 

[Russwinters]

look up the word significantly

It can be the difference of a load stutter and smooth peformance in games; from my experience. Results obviously vary.


Yes, defragmenting shortens your drive's lifespan, that is why you shouldn't do it. way to go proving my point

no, defragmentating does not shorten your lifespan; if a drive fails during a defragment it was likely no longer mechanically sound anymore, and was beginning to fail. It's like driving a car with a failing radiatior, it will probably run fine when driven lightley, but as soon as you begin to push it problems with beging to arise, and when you take it on the freeway the engine will likely overheat completely.



1. Electricity costs money
2. The CPU is not the only electricity consuming device in the computer
3. This is why you defrag overnight

This is at your own discretion, but honestly, we are talking fractions of a dollor here to run your PC every day, even a PC with Dual 295's, I7, etc would only consume ~.50 a day idle, if that; and as I said before, defragmenting uses very little CPU cycles, maybe 10% of your overall processing power. The only people whos power bills really suffer from PC use are heavy Folders.



you yourself said to leave your computer on all night so it can defrag... if you are leaving your computer on when not using it to defrag, then you are wasting a ton of electricity and money.
If you turn it off when not in use, then you are going to defrag while working...
if you set a schedule, it will end up defragging while you work... unless you schedule it for night and leave it on all night
if you do not set a schedule, you need to manually defrag all the time.


I don't think the argument of leaving your PC on overnight is relavent to the subject. We are only discussing if defragmenting is useful. I know many friends who leave their PCs on for long periods of time idle. I personally shut my PC down when I am not going to be using it for anything greater then two hours or so, otherwise I will let it sit idle.

If you don't want to leave your PC on overnight, then find some time to defragment it. It typically only takes a few hours at most; my home pc with ~250GB of data on it only takes around 20 minutes, so you can kind of gauge that it's roughly 25 minutes per 250GB of data, obviously this can change based on the level of fragmentation.

 

[taltamir]

We are only discussing if defragmenting is useful

My understanding was that we are discussing if defragmenting is worth the COST, not if it is useful.

 

[Russwinters]

Originally posted by: 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?

This is the original question. I do not see any mention of power.

In fact, the original poster states he builds a new system once a year. I would say that the cost of his power bill is of no consequence. (At least the difference defragging overnight would take)


Regards,

 

[taltamir]

There is no need to defragment overnight, ever. Just DO NOT CHANGE THE DEFAULTS IN WINDOWS VISTA / 7.
It will intelligently defrag in the background when the computer is not in use.
Windows 7 having the best defragger.

 

[Majic 7]

Do not assume that the defragger will wake your Vista machine to do it's scheduled defrag like an auto-update. It doesn't, as per this tutorial, http://www.vistax64.com/tutori...disk-defragmenter.html . I thought it was doing it's thing in the background, but apparently not. Because of this thread I got curious and did a manual defrag and it took about 12 hours on only 67GBs. Six for sure and don't know how many hours while I was asleep. Something doesn't add up. Lately I have been seeing a large increase in ram usage. Used to be around 20 to 22% all the time when idle, maybe 25% doing stuff. It had risen to 31% lately. Thought it was either Chrome leaking or the new version of ESET that I installed. After defragging my ram usage went back to what it used to be. The svchost process that handles Superfetch dropped from 170,000K to 123,000K, which is what it was before. Actually used the Auslogics defragger once in while, it's suggested in the tutorial, but I don't think it does anything but give you something to watch. It didn't have an effect like the Vista defragger did.

 

[taltamir]

maybe i am wrong about vista then... win7 works like a charm though. I never notice it defragmenting and it says my spindle drive is at 0 fragmentation (and refuses to run on my SSD)

 

[martensite]

I defrag regularly, or rather, my defragger Diskeeper 2k9 pro does, since it's on automatic. I never bother running it manually, and all the volumes are all nice and 'clean' whenever I've check up them.

No harm in defragging. I've never had a problem arise from it, and it has clearly helped improve responsiveness of some systems (especially laptops) that I've 'cleaned up' for friends. That said, if there is no fragmentation in the first place, then will not be a benefit (obviously).

As for the electricity costs of defrag, it's laughable lol..with current CPUs, resource usage for defrag is just a few % for a few mins a day..not even a drop in the ocean of other processes that are running.

 

[jimhsu]

Originally posted by: taltamir
Games primarily use SEQUENTIAL operations, not random ones. Specifically, reading lots of textures.

To clarify, I believe you mean modern games. Specifically, MMORPGs are much more prone to random operations (area transitions, towns with thousands of low-res models (e.g. armors), chat/combat logs, etc) than other games. That plus relatively low GPU usage makes IO a more likely bottleneck. I elaborated a little more here:

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2332845&enterthread=y

With personal untimed tests, I see MASSIVE improvements in a game like WoW (3-4x faster loads) and only something like a 20% improvement in something like Fallout.

 

[jimhsu]

I think the consensus is "There is no need to run a manual defrag program when Windows Vista and 7 do it automatically for you", not "Completely disable defrag on all your drives".

There seems to be the assumption that people are ACTUALLY using Vista and W7 on halfway decent computers (read - anything built in the past 3-4 years). From the computers I had to fix for people (we're taking 5 THOUSAND fragments for a file of a few hundred megabytes) on Windows XP, this is most definitely not the case. Things were so bad that the start menu took several seconds to navigate to each menu item. There are no large files like textures or movies on that computer - strictly internet and email. Defrag in that case doesn't even work - I suggested basically "back up everything and do a complete wipe".

 

[taltamir]

if you get it that bad, then backup, reformat and copy it back would be a good idea; much MUCH faster than defrag. How in the world do they even GET them so messed up is beyond me.
Then again I often get a "I got this popup that said i have a virus, i followed ALL the instructions it gave me, even the advanced stuff like installing programs, confirming user account popups, and changing settings and now my computer is totally messed and i still get this same warning about viruses, only it will not clean it."
ugh, i HATE the "anti virus 200X" malware (not a virus, it doesn't install itself, it tricks people into installing it)...

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: taltamir
never ever defrag

Last time I defragged was when I was still using FAT32.

 

[Sarachan]

I defrag it regularly each day, at the same time, no matter if I'm home or not, since my main machine (and server) are both running 24/7, swapping files, opening and examining them, doing scans and all the stuff like that in preassossiated order - when I'm not home. Once I arrive, I usually first check the websites for newer HW-news, then the forums, and after that, start playing. Never had a problem with anything. A few months ago I bought SSD for my laptop, and have never defragged it, and never will.

 

[DestruyaUR]

Defraggler is what I use. It's quick and I normally do it once per week.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Originally posted by: taltamir
if that was the case, calling tech support would be useful

No, you've confused what their job is with what you think it should be.
Their job is to read from a script. And they probably get rather good at it. That this isn't particularly useful to you is irrelevant to the degree of congruence to Russwinters' assertion.
When properly formatted, your example disproves nothing.

You should be more careful when constructing analogies. You left bits dangling all over the place on that one.

Originally posted by: taltamirif you are leaving your computer on when not using it to defrag, then you are wasting a ton of electricity and money.

Going by Anand's Lynnfield article, a typical system uses ~180w when under load. Even though defragging doesn't use 100% cpu resources (my CPU stays at its lowest Cool & Quiet state for most of a defrag), lets up that to 200w just to give us a nice, even 1/5 kw.
Average residential electricity cost is $0.12/kwh.
That means a 1 hour defrag costs 2.4 cents.

Afterwards, the system will go into S3 suspend unless you've disabled it for some stupid reason; and S3 is comparable to off for energy usage (off is not 0w), especially as it saves you boot activity.

Originally posted by: DestruyaUR Defraggler is what I use.

Me too, since on this computer I didn't have the option of delegating a partition/drive to the OS, so I like the option it gives me to move all files of a type/size to the end of the drive. So I move all my media files during the defrag (since transfer rate isn't important with MP3s or AVIs), then after Defraggler I use Bootvis to optimize the boot. (AFAIK, Bootvis is the same as XP's automatic boot defrag, but I have that disabled.)

This seems to work well.

 

[taltamir]

Afterwards, the system will go into S3 suspend unless you've disabled it for some stupid reason

I disable it because it fails to recognize a lot of actions as use...
EX: running a torrent, defragging, watching a movie, listening to music, and many others will NOT prevent the computer from going into sleep mode automatically. Thus i disable auto sleep and manually send it to sleep WHENEVER not in use.

That being said. my spindle drive is at 0% fragmentation using windows 7 default settings, manual sleep mode whenever not in use (that is, even if i am just leaving for a short time), and intelligent use (aka, preallocate torrents enabled, etc). the rare case when i get a fragmentation (by windows 7 looser standards of only counting fragments under 64mb) it is automatically defragged without my notice; that is a definite plus on windows 7 part.

dedicated programs like diskkeeper just unduly thrash the drive defragging every last ounce of free space and making sure every file is continues regardless of "fragment" size. waste of time and money.

PS. don't assume 200 watt, assume 120 watt, because that is idle / near idle consumption. But if you leave it overnight it will take 1.44 cents per hour, it adds up.