Defragmenting Hard Drives

[seeseeme]

Hi all,

As I understand it there are a number of opinions about Defragmenting Hard Drives with many saying that it is only really necessary when large content of Data is moved or Deleted. Ffor the most part these are the basic rules I apply when looking at Defragmenting my Hard Drives.

I have recently brought an Seagate External Hard Drive and while Defragmenting another Drive I ran an Analysis of my External Hard Drive and it listed a quite a few files as being Fragmented. Some of these files where located in the "System Volume Information" folder.

Should this then indicate that the External Hard Drive now needs Defragmenting?

Any thoughts appreciated.

Craig

 

[American_Connections]

Never is not enough

Daily Dude, it will never hurt to defrag as much as you want, just gets where it keeps things clean and does not take so long. I always try to clean disks, run antispy, clean histories, every day or two. Then defrag about once a week.

 

[fran1]

The system folder is part of your o/s which I'd have thought to be on an internal drive. Upon saying that I think the system has a piece on each seperate drive you have.
Files become fragmented (dont know how) and I defrag my drives about once a month. Even without deleting anything off a drive they still become fragmented. Some folk never do it and claim to have no problems, if they analysed a drive and looked at the mess they might think again.
Another thing I do is to partition drives, say a 320 into 4x80. And my o/s is on a small drive of its own so in theory if i get a virus is doesn't mess the rest up. It makes for easier defragging as well, a 320 will take ages, an 80 maybe 30 mins. The hard bit is remembering to do 1 a night.

 

[pommie]

Run Linux, no defragging ever again

Go the penguin :hehe: :hehe:

Back to Winblows, I defrag (Windoze) whenever I think that I have deleted/copied/written enough times to warrant it, that could be as short as a week or as long as months, as an aside, next time you install a Windows o/s check the hdd as soon as you have finished, stupid XP had placed one 2.4kB file in over 10,000 places

Cheers David

 

[johnwhelan]

What you are trying to do is ensure that the hard drive head moves a minimum amount when loading files.

There is a trade off between packing the files on the drive and performance.

What you want to avoid is a large file that is read often from being spread out over the hard drive. What you don't care about are files that are accessed infrequently. Some system files for example are log files and to be honest if there is a but of space under the head its more efficient to write the fragment there than worry about putting it all together. It's unlikely to be read again in any case. The jetlog file is an example, turn it off if you don't need it and save it cluttering up the drive.

If you install the operating system and Trainz on a newly formatted partition then the files are installed in order. If you install Trainz on a drive that has lots of other junk on it then Trainz files get scattered around. They aren't necessarily fragmented but they aren't together.

Diskeeper 2010 professional is a very nice tool that lays out the files slightly differently but at the cost of a hard drive I'm not certain its worth while.

When you defrag with the Windows tool you move files around the drive. Each individual file may not be fragmented but the groups of files get split up.

So the recommendation is defrag before installing new software, this puts all the space together then the files are grouped by application.

Defragmenting too often and all you do is add wear to the hard drive and basically mix up the files instead of allowing them to be grouped by application.

Cheerio John

 

[crohakon]

Run Linux, no defragging ever again

Go the penguin :hehe: :hehe:

Back to Winblows, I defrag (Windoze) whenever I think that I have deleted/copied/written enough times to warrant it, that could be as short as a week or as long as months, as an aside, next time you install a Windows o/s check the hdd as soon as you have finished, stupid XP had placed one 2.4kB file in over 10,000 places

Cheers David

I have Ubuntu install on a separate hard drive on my laptop. Vista 64x on hda, Ubuntu x64 on hdb.

My goal was to completely migrate to linux... but trainz keeps me in windows! Darn you Auran! :hehe:

 

[norfolksouthern37]

its you guys so dead set on running windows xp that have to deal with this.

 

[seeseeme]

Some folk never do it and claim to have no problems, if they analysed a drive and looked at the mess they might think again.

Thanks for the replies everyone, you have all basically answered my thoughts. The work I have done on my new Hard Drive, apart from backing up content (it's only for backup purposes), was to remove a few small files but nothing in the order of 100's of MB. The other Drive I was actually interested in Defraging, I had just deleted nearly 2GB of content so I thought that certainly justified a Defrag :hehe:.

Fran, I remember someone on the forum posting about how slow there computer and Trainz where so I asked how long had it been since they did a Defrag. He/she replied it was sometime and later posted again saying that the Defrag had improved the speed a considerable amount. So it would seem there are times when it will be needed very much.

John, thanks for the thought about Defraging before installing new software. I had not thought of that one. When I do install new software I do other things such as clean up the registry etc but had not thought of Defraging.

Many thanks everyone for the replies.

Craig

 

[john259]

Craig,

External drives often come FAT32 formatted. If that's the case with yours then you might want to consider converting it to NTFS. Obviously close all programs, then open a command window and use this MS-DOS command:
CONVERT x: /FS:NTFS
where x: is the drive in question. I think it probably does an automatic reboot when it finishes.

HTH, John

 

[Johnk]

I agree with John Whelan's comments on this one. Defragging a hard drive for the sake of it just wears out the drive well before its use-by date. I've been repairing computers before hard drives were invented for home or personal use. At present I have four computers, but I'm carving that back to two. In the 25 plus years I've been involved with them, I've probably de fragmented my hard drives (or at least some of them) FIVE (5) times. reason being that de fragmenting makes virtually no difference to computer performance.

My rule of thumb to anyone is this: Partition your drives when you purchase your computer or external drives. My brand new 500 gig Seagate has four partitions and my 1 terabyte external WD has five (5).

Place Trainz in its own partition and all the junk you collect with it in another one. That way, de fragmenting is totally unnecessary. If you do stuff up, format the partition (after you backup of course) and reload Trainz. Formatting and reinstalling is about one squillion times more effective than de fragmenting will ever be.

Of all the things that will make your computer work better, de fragmenting rates about 90 in a scale of 1 to 100. It's the biggest scam in the computer industry, but it has made many people rich.

 

[Hot_Box_Detector]

High quality defragger?

Seems like this subject came up a while back. At that time one of the more computer savvy members suggested a 3rd party defrag program that really gets the job done. Seems like the built-in MS defragmenter and programs like Auslogics, just "skim" the drive and get the worst fragments.

Anybody remember the name of the PRO defragger?

Thanks, Durff

PS: JohnK, didn't the old DOS and WIN 95 defrag look at each byte? Seems like they took forever....maybe it was just the slower CPU ?

 

[johnwhelan]

Seems like this subject came up a while back. At that time one of the more computer savvy members suggested a 3rd party defrag program that really gets the job done. Seems like the built-in MS defragmenter and programs like Auslogics, just "skim" the drive and get the worst fragments.

Anybody remember the name of the PRO defragger?

Thanks, Durff

PS: JohnK, didn't the old DOS and WIN 95 defrag look at each byte? Seems like they took forever....maybe it was just the slower CPU ?

Diskeeper 2010, an old version of diskeeper is the windows built in defragmentor.

Cheerio John

 

[Johnk]

Durff, When I did Win 95 stuff for clients (can't remember what I did with Dos, but probably used Norton Utilities), I used Fixit Utilities which I liked at the time. Today I use Defragla put out by CCLeaner and it seems to be okay.

The secret with defragging is to ensure everything is turned off, especially virus scanners. If any program accesses the disk for any reason, the defragger has to start from the beginning again.

Win 3-0 and Win 95 defraggers used to show every cluster being moved, but one never knows if that was just clever programming showing off a bit of eye candy.

I think Defragler looks at what programs you use most and groups them together. It takes a while to build up a database, so you won't get results from day one. For what they do, I'd go for Defragler unless you want to spend money.

 

[john259]

Auslogics Disk Defrag is freeware, seems to do the business, is quick at least on my largely defragged disks, has caused me no hassles, and is quite happy to run to completion while other programs are running. The same company also have a screen saver version, a Registry Cleaner and some other utility programs (some freeware, some payware).

I and RBR have no connection with them other than as very satisfied users of their products.

John

 

[OldEric]

Auslogics

Seems like the built-in MS defragmenter and programs like Auslogics, just "skim" the drive and get the worst fragments.

Auslogics 3.1.2.90 now digs deeper with an optimizer. The initial scan is very slow. Following scans with a memory are much faster. More than adequate for what we want (my opinion).

 

[john259]

I might be wrong but my guess is that Auslogics optimise option moves files so as to create contiguous free space. It certainly takes much longer with that option enabled.

John

 

[Johnk]

I thought that all defraggers attempted to do that. It's probably looking at "most used" files and trying to assemble them ito some kind of logical order close to the centre of the disk. This is all very well and also very nice, provided it gets things right. In the case of Trainz, the core exe file that gets hit the most may well be surrounded by Excel, Word and other game files that are also well worn. Lessor used Trainz files may still be on the outer perimeters, thus creating just as much work for the read/write heads even after defragmenting took place.

it's obvious that the people selling this stuff have succeeded in making users believe there are huge benefits to be made defragging on a regular basis. Me, well I'm not convinced, so defragging is a task I'm quite happy to leave to others.

I think it's a feel good thing. It's at least one operation the average PC user can do which will hopefully make his/her machine run ten times faster.

It reminds me of an office memo I once saw: "After careful consideration, the company has decided to remane the Accounting and Auditing department to Auditing and Accounting. We believe these changes will greatly improve efficiency!"

 

[Hot_Box_Detector]

Ability to defrag one folder?

Thanks for all the responses...let me throw another wild card out here...

Is there a defrag program that will let you select one folder, i.e. Auran, and defrag only the contents of that folder. My Auran stuff resides on a 150GB external drive and for practical purposes, Trainz is the only program that I access with any regularity. Why should I have to wait 20-30 minutes for the whole drive to be indexed, compressed, etc...

Just a thought.

 

[john259]

The Auslogics program allows you to specify a single folder to be defragmented (Action > Defrag a Folder). I don't know if it automatically processes all the subfolders of it, or whether you have to specify them separately.

John

 

[seeseeme]

Craig,

External drives often come FAT32 formatted. If that's the case with yours then you might want to consider converting it to NTFS. Obviously close all programs, then open a command window and use this MS-DOS command:
CONVERT x: /FS:NTFS
where x: is the drive in question. I think it probably does an automatic reboot when it finishes.

HTH, John

Thanks John, I checked this before I brought the Hard Drive and it was already formatted to NTFS so that was handy.

I have in the past searched on the forum for help about Defraging and some of the comments here are similar, however there are some new comments and thoughts and that makes this quite an interesting thread.

Many thanks for every ones replies/post.

Craig