Defragment

After how many percent file fragmentation do you guys usually defrag?

 

I just degrag when I click analyze and it tells me that the volume needs to be defragmented.

 

I use this rather than the built in defragment in XP.

http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/index.php

Seems to work well.

I defrag after installing/uninstall, or downloading a large file. If I dont then usually about once a week anyways.

 

Defragmentation's value is pretty hotly debated among a number of experts and some even say it's virtually unneeded with modern file systems and only really serves only to cause more wear and tear on the hard drive than is necessary. I really don't worry about it much.

 

^ I dont believe that is true at all.

I noticed after installing a large game like BF2 and the BF2142 Demo.

I tried playing both before defragging.

Needless to say, after I defragged everything loaded faster and was much smoother.

Same thing with other apps.

Not defragging itself can actually cause extra wear on the HDD.

 

I defrag once every 2-3 weeks, or after uninstalling major software. If I defrag boot files using O&O Defrag and use the ACCESS method, I noticed a significant decrease in boot time (about 15-20 secs).

 

I have a program that defrags my computer whenever it is plugged in and the disk isn't being used. I haven't manually defragged a hard drive in over a year because it was needed. Every time I click defrag it tells me I had somewhere in the neighbor hood of 5 file fragments, I suppose thats good.

 

Like I said, it's a pretty debatable subject and everyone subscribes to a different school of thought. I've never really installed any huge games, but I have installed some pretty big video editing apps and haven't noticed much difference. But that's just me.
Saying that not defragging puts wear on a hard drive could be considered valid as the heads have to seek further and much more often. On the other hand it could also be said that excessive wear comes from defragging regularly because the platters get more abuse from frequently having large blocks of data rewritten from one sector to another. Six of one, half dozen of another I guess.

 

Well perhaps a once a month defrag would sit in that happy middle ground....also if the analysis comes back saying not to bother then dont bother to defrag...and vice versa... Its that simple. If it aint broke dont fix it.
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Maybe even once a month is overkill, unless you installed large apps. I'd say a few months, maybe even half a year.

 

Same with me, I guess that's what the Anazlyze function was there/created for?

 

I don't understand how there can be any controversy over defragmenting NTFS volumes. NTFS is a significantly move advanced file system then FAT was, but at its core it is still a cluster based file system, and files will fragment over time just as they do with FAT. Perhaps more slowly, but they will fragment nonetheless.

I believe that the rumor that 'you don't need to defragment NTFS' first came about during the Windows NT era, when volume size was still on the order of hundreds of megabytes, perhaps a few gigabytes on servers, and fragmentation of NTFS was as a result very slow. Also, Microsoft did not even include a defragmenting utility in the early versions of NT, which gave even more credibility to this rumor.

However, on modern system that have a lot of files of different sizes downloaded and deleted all the time, fragmentation can occur quite quickly. The hard drive is the clear bottleneck in todays systems, so you should defragment regularly. Imagine this scenario - you run CCleaner to delete ~800MB of small temporary files scattered throughout your hard drive, them proceed to install a 4GB game off a DVD. There is a decent chance your game was just installed into at least 800MB of fragmented space - what do you think that does for load times?

I recommend PerfectDisk. I've had a lot of luck with versions 7 and 8 of the program, and it does a much better job then DiskKeeper does. I have it set to run a defrag and a reboot/offline defrag combination on my desktop every Wednesday at 3:00am (since that's where the majority of my downloading goes on and things fragment a lot) and I use it to defrag my laptop when it absolutly needs it (trying to avoid undue stress/heat on the laptop drive).

 

Indeed, I've discussed this issue on another thread sometime before.

I still believe that "every Wednesday" is too often to defragment unless major installation/copying events have happenned between two Wendesdays. I can't substantiate this claim, but based on experience I feel that performance doesn't really degrade so quickly, and you add more wear to the HDD unnecessarily.

But that' subjective. Maybe there's a guide posted somewhere on this issue, which really supports the recommended frequencies.

Moreover, I don't think desktop and notebook HDDs are too different in terms of reliability. If they are, I would bet on the notebook HDD without a doubt, they are the ones which should be more reliable, take more heat and wear.

 

It's more a preventative thing then anything else. I don't like running the resident defragmenter type programs that claim to do it in the background, but I also don't like for it to take many hours when I do decide to do it.

I'm also in the process of reorganizing the contents of my HDs to split programs and data, so there has been a lot of copying and moving of files going on lately.

 

Indeed, splitting programs and data helps. In fact, I would say, is necessary to prevent fragmentation from becoming a problem.

It's a bad idea to download/often manipulate large amounts of data on the OS partition, better download either to a data or a dedicated download partition, which can stay fragmented for longer times without significant impact on the system performance.

 

It's also better if you happen to hose your Windows install

It's amazing how much hard drives have improved in the past few years, though. I just bought one of those new Seagate 7200.10's... The average transfer rate is about as fast as the original 36GB 10000RPM Raptors. And Seagate says they can get much higher densities out of their perpindicular recording process with minimal changes to their line hardware. I can't wait for laptop drives with that density.

 

As you say I am sure it is debatable, I mean you could say that if your drive was fragmented then your head is flipping all over the place trying to retrieve data from different places on the drive causing excess wear?

All I know is that if I am using a work PC that is slow, the first thing I will do is delete all temp files and rubbish and defrag the drive.

I came back to my work PC last week (from being in the states since may) it is a dual Xeon 3.0ghz Pc with twin HDDs, it was runing slower than my 6+ year old compaq, I had a look there was only 3gb left in C: I Cleaned 20gb rubbish, defregged and deffinately improved performance.

I am sure you can over do it, but if you have an old or heavily used system, a good clean out and defrag, for me improves peformance.

 

I say, defrag when you feel like it.

 

I usually run the TuneXP ultra-fast booting tool after running CCleaner once a month or so. I've noticed a significant increase in boot time if I just run a windows defrag.