Defragmenting your Hard Drive(s)

[Shindo_Hikaru]

Let's compare defragmenting your hard drive to washing the dishes.

The easiest way to clean your dishes is to do them right after you eat. Cleanup is fast: Rinse them off, maybe give them a quick swipe with the sponge, and voila! They're clean.

Now let's say you wait a few days to clean your dishes. Now you've got a larger pile of dishes to do. The most recent ones will still clean up pretty easily, but the ones that have been sitting the longest will require a bit more elbow grease.

What if you didn't do your dishes for a several weeks? Now you've got your work cut out for you. By this time you'd have dishes piled all over the kitchen. And the quantity isn't the only problem: Most of those dishes will need some serious scrubbing. (Got a chisel?) The job is so daunting that it might be tempting to simply throw out the whole lot and buy a new set of dishes.

Disk fragmentation works the same way. By defragmenting daily, you quickly and easily eliminate fragmentation before it can cause a problem. Nice and simple.

Wait a couple of days, and fragmentation starts to build up exponentially. Yes, you can restore your computer's performance by defragmenting, but chances are it's going to take a while.

As the number of file frgments increases, performance and reliability take a nose-dive.

If you don't defragment at all, things get really messy. Your computer slows to a crawl, has trouble running multiple applications, and it may suffer excruciatingly long boot times. After a while, it may not even boot at all.

Many people who aren't aware of the problems that fragmentation causes will simply get rid of the computer because it's "old and slow", and replace it with a new one-just like buying a new set of dishes, when simply cleaning the old ones would solve the problem.

Daily defragmentation is simpler than doing the dishes. Just install an automatic defragmenter, and it takes care of the problem for you. And because it's handled promptly, defragmentation is so quick and easy that it can be done in the background so you can use your computer while it's defragmenting.

Don't let those dishes pile up!

[Inferi0r]

I use an automatic: O&O Defrag

Is this a good choice?

[prx984]

i defrag once a week. i know i should probably do more than that, but my computer never takes more than 10 minutes to defrag all of the drive (about 15gb) i dont do much on my computers anyway, i have all my music and a few programs i run, but thats about it. so i guess it doesn't need as much of a defrag.

my laptop has about 3.5gb used, so a defrag on that is never more than 5 minutes so i do it daily. plus its just a usage factor, my laptop gets used much more than my desktop. my desktop is started about 2 or 3 times a week, my laptop is about 4 or 5 times a day o_O

so the usage factor is also something to consider.

[LLXX]

Every 3 months.

I don't work with many files, so there is much less fragmenting.

[Tarun]

I'm sorry, but this post honestly is offering terrible advice.

Okay, so you want to defrag every day and increase the wear and tear of your hard drive? Let's take Windows XP for example. The Windows NTFS barely fragments to begin with. On top of that, Windows XP has a very simple command called ProcessIdleTasks. Simply put this code in the Run dialog box: Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks

Windows XP observes file usage patterns as the system is used. If deemed necessary, Windows XP will adjust the file layout at three day intervals. By placing files that are referenced together near each other on the disk, and towards the more dense outer edge of the disk, seek distances are reduced which results in shorter seek times and improved performance. The performance benefit of placing files becomes increasing important as the size of the disk increases.

The files moved for more efficient layout are also kept contiguous. Windows XP does not intentionally fragment files as was done by some earlier versions of Windows.

Even though the disk layout optimization does insure some files will be defragmented, it is not a complete substitute for fully defragmenting the disk. Users should still defragment their drives regularly. The built-in Windows XP defragmentation program understands the file layout directives and will position the files if they arent already placed properly. However, it will not update the layout file with new information gathered in the last three days. Without manual intervention, the layout file, %windir%\Prefetch\Layout.ini, will only be updated once every three days. The contents of the Layout.ini file can be viewed with Notepad.

[Shindo_Hikaru]

Yes their come wear and tear on your Drives by do so, but this offers a glimps on preventive maintance, it does not mean for the user to do it everyday but to bring light on the subject, that drives should be defragmented.

[Tarun]

What source did you get that from? It has so many things wrong with it. NTFS never really gets badly fragmented. Now, the 9x/ME FAT32 system does get fragmented VERY easily. You may want to fix your first post.

--------------------

Performance

NTFS is built for speed with impressive disk I/O performance on large volumes (Over 400 MB). NTFS uses a binary tree structure for all disk directories, which reduces the number of times the system has to access the disk to locate files. This system is best for large directories, and NTFS easily outperforms FAT32 in these situations. In addition, NTFS automatically sorts files in a folder on the fly. NTFS gains an edge over FAT32 by using relatively small disk allocation units (cluster sizes) for NTFS volumes. Smaller clusters prevent wasted disk space on volumes, especially those with numerous small files. Because NTFS uses small clusters better and has a more efficient design, its performance doesn't degrade with large volumes, in contrast to FAT's. As the number of files and volume size increases NTFS performance is not effected but FAT32 continually gets worse.

Reliability

In addition to its extensive memory and application protection features, NTFS is a reliable file system. When storing data to disk, NTFS records file I/O events to a special transaction log. If the system crashes or encounters an interruption, NTFS can use this log to restore the volume and prevent corruption from an abnormal program termination or system shutdown. NTFS doesn't commit an action to disk until it verifies the successful completion of the action. This precaution helps prevent corruption of an NTFS volume. NTFS also supports hot-fixing disk sectors, where the OS automatically blocks out bad disk sectors and relocates data from these sectors. This housecleaning happens in the background. An application attempting to read or write data on a hot-fixed area will never know the disk had a problem. I only recommend and use NTFS with Windows 2000 and XP."

[Shindo_Hikaru]

Yes all of the above is true, but maintaining a sechdule to your usage is recommended. In my post, it does nto mention which file system is needing more defragmenting, it is generalized for the purpose of expaining the benifits of defragmenting. So no fixing is needed.

[ripken204]

i dont think its all true. i just defragged my c: drive for the 1st time since ive installed windows 2 months ago. it took about 20 sec to defrag...

[gunsmokingman]

You can never hurt your hard drive by defragging, you can never defrag to much. I have never read any where that defragging can damage your hard drive.

I use a simple VBS script to defrag my drives. Here a script that runs clean manager then defrag all the local drives.

Const Hidden = 0,Normal = 1,Min = 2
  Const HD = 2
  Dim Act, Fso, Ts
   Set Act = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
   Set Fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
	 Act.run ("cleanmgr /sagerun:99"),1 , True
	 Act.popup "Completed The Clean Up", 3 , "Finished", 0 + 48 
   Dim Drv : Set Drv = Fso.Drives
	For Each objDrv in Drv
	 If objDrv.DriveType = HD Then 
		Act.Popup "Preparing To Defrag This Drive = " & objDrv.DriveLetter & "\" &_
		vbCrLf  & "Drive Name = " & objDrv.VolumeName, 5, "Defrag Drive", 0 + 32
		Act.Run("Defrag.exe " & objDrv & "\  -F"), Min,True
	 End if
   Next

[Tarun]

i dont think its all true. i just defragged my c: drive for the 1st time since ive installed windows 2 months ago. it took about 20 sec to defrag...

You're right ripken, it's not true at all. As I'm sure you know, defragmenting causes excessive disk usage by moving files to reorder them to eliminate free space gaps between files. If you do this every day, that's far more wear and tear on your computer's hard drive.

Defragmenting once every month or two I can see being feasible. Daily is far too excessive and will cause more problems than what it's worth.

I'm really surprised that people don't realize that defragging frequently (even daily) does more harm than good.

[prx984]

guys, i got a question about defraging.

i used DG-Defragmenter and "disk usage before degragmentation" in the below pic was that, then after defragmentation part was after a windows defrag.

why does it keep putting that block back? i dont care, i just want to know.

Edited July 29, 2006 by Cygnus

[Tarun]

Different defrag utilities use different algorithms. The Windows defrag is a freeware version of Diskeeper.

I've had the best results with PerfectDisk.

[Shindo_Hikaru]

It may be some system file(s) or the page file which is usually not moveable, but the files with in the bocks can be defraged with certian programs only after a restart, as the program needs total access.

[prx984]

k, i get it now, thanks for clearing it up. my dad kept bugging me about it, always wondering why the thing put those blocks way out in the middle of the drive.