I defrag my hard drives about once a week, sometimes less, depending upon how much I use the computer, and what it's used for. One of the good things about defragmenting a hard drive is it makes file recovery a bit easier. If all of a program's data is close together, then if there are drive errors, it can make salvaging the data a bit easier. The reason is if the data is scattered through out a drive, then recovering the complete files becomes more difficult. If they are clustered together, then the files can be scooped up much easier in one shot.
I have found that performance is better after defragmenting my hard drive with Trainz. I think this has to do with the number of small files that get loaded into memory as the program runs. This may become less and less of an issue as the graphics files and data are much larger than they used to be.
One of the most helpful things I found was defragging the Asset.tdx file. This was outside of a drive defrag. For this I used Contig.exe. This is a command line utility that has a switches to specify files, and other messages. It is part of the Microsoft System Internals utilities, and is written by Mark Russinovich, who is one of the top Windows programmers and MSDOS experts out there.
Regarding Unix and Linux, the files do get fragmented in these operating systems as well. Run FSCK in standalone mode and it will tell you how much fragmentation exists on the drive as it parses the slices.
Diskeeper 10 seems to be a big disappointment to me. I have used their software since the very beginning, including their original version written for the VAX/VMS environment where they originally started. This new version seems to be glossed over and says a lot of nothing, sadly. Of all of the useful features of DK, I found the ability to defrag the MFT and compress the size of this file structure-database to be the most helpful. I noticed a substantial improvement in performance.
Here are a couple of free defragmentation programs available.
JK Defrag http://jkdefrag.com/
Smart Defrag. http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html
The results were surprisingly similar to what DK gave me in performance afterwards. The reason for looking for an alternative solution to the built-in defragmenting program is the built-in programs were dreadfully slow. The one used in Vista took forever to do the job, where as these applications were more efficient in their operations.
The main advantage of DK over the built-in and some free applets is the ability to perform the operation on more than one drive at a time.
John
I have found that performance is better after defragmenting my hard drive with Trainz. I think this has to do with the number of small files that get loaded into memory as the program runs. This may become less and less of an issue as the graphics files and data are much larger than they used to be.
One of the most helpful things I found was defragging the Asset.tdx file. This was outside of a drive defrag. For this I used Contig.exe. This is a command line utility that has a switches to specify files, and other messages. It is part of the Microsoft System Internals utilities, and is written by Mark Russinovich, who is one of the top Windows programmers and MSDOS experts out there.
Regarding Unix and Linux, the files do get fragmented in these operating systems as well. Run FSCK in standalone mode and it will tell you how much fragmentation exists on the drive as it parses the slices.
Diskeeper 10 seems to be a big disappointment to me. I have used their software since the very beginning, including their original version written for the VAX/VMS environment where they originally started. This new version seems to be glossed over and says a lot of nothing, sadly. Of all of the useful features of DK, I found the ability to defrag the MFT and compress the size of this file structure-database to be the most helpful. I noticed a substantial improvement in performance.
Here are a couple of free defragmentation programs available.
JK Defrag http://jkdefrag.com/
Smart Defrag. http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html
The results were surprisingly similar to what DK gave me in performance afterwards. The reason for looking for an alternative solution to the built-in defragmenting program is the built-in programs were dreadfully slow. The one used in Vista took forever to do the job, where as these applications were more efficient in their operations.
The main advantage of DK over the built-in and some free applets is the ability to perform the operation on more than one drive at a time.
John