Defragmenting Hard Drive

[Lord Vetinari]

LouB wrote:


Based on experiences with IBM 2300 series drives in the 1960s, you'll sure
know it if a head does touch the disc. Goodbye head, goodbye disc. Those
drives had removable disc packs and the greatest fear was that some dust
might settle on a disc surface while changing packs. And with 2311 packs
holding 7.5 megabytes on 10 surfaces and 2314s holding 15 megabytes on 20
surfaces, changing them was a constant activity. To make it worse. it took
90 seconds for a drive to come to a stop and another 90 seconds to come
back up to speed, plus one to two minutes to actually change the pack,
every pack change resulted in four to five minutes lost time. And yes, I
did mean MEGAbytes.

Heh, I have a disc pack. I don't remember where I got it from, but it's
kinda cute, anyway.

 

[Lord Vetinari]

Actually, NTFS disks do fragment and the fragmentation can cause a real
performance hit.

Yup. The drive I defragged yesterday, for a friend, had made him very
nervous, because the extreme fragmentation was making the drive chatter a
LOT.

 

[Leythos]

Yup. The drive I defragged yesterday, for a friend, had made him very
nervous, because the extreme fragmentation was making the drive chatter a
LOT.

Just imagine how much chattering it was doing before the defrag.

Depending on the actual sound, chattering can be a sign of a drive going
bad, but not always.

 

[Lord Vetinari]

Just imagine how much chattering it was doing before the defrag.

heh....you might like to reread what I said, there.

Depending on the actual sound, chattering can be a sign of a drive going
bad, but not always.

Usually, the damned things die fairly quietly. In this case, there was no
doubt as to the problem....the drive was purchased new in July, and hadn't
been used since September (his laptop stopped booting up).

 

[David Simpson]

heh....you might like to reread what I said, there.

MyDefrag is a very good free defrager. Can't do the super system files,
but works great for all other files. For heavy add/delete drive (like a
TV media server) you can set it to defrag (no optimize) only. Takes
about 5 minutes a night to do my 4TB plus of disk space, plus lots a
flexabity if you can get your head around his scripting! Then once in a
while a do a defrag and optimize. (4 hours a drive!)



--
_______________________________________________
/ David Simpson \
| (e-mail address removed) |
| http://www.nyx.net/~dsimpson |
|We got to go to the crappy town where I'm a hero.|
\_______________________________________________/

 

[Lord Vetinari]

MyDefrag is a very good free defrager.

So is Defraggler....and Defraggler has a much more amusing name.

Can't do the super system files,
but works great for all other files. For heavy add/delete drive (like a
TV media server) you can set it to defrag (no optimize) only. Takes
about 5 minutes a night to do my 4TB plus of disk space, plus lots a
flexabity if you can get your head around his scripting! Then once in a
while a do a defrag and optimize. (4 hours a drive!)

My friend was totally unaware of defragging. He knows now, and shouldn't
have such difficulties in the future.

 

[Ophelia]

So is Defraggler....and Defraggler has a much more amusing name.


My friend was totally unaware of defragging. He knows now, and shouldn't
have such difficulties in the future.

PAH! Dontcha know it is now called 'defragling'? Huh? but don't ya?? <g>

 

[Lord Vetinari]

PAH! Dontcha know it is now called 'defragling'? Huh? but don't ya?? <g>

Shouldn't that be "defraggling"? Heh. I beg of you to accept my excuse, I
wuz tarred, tarred to thuh bone.

 

[Gilgamesh]

I was pleased to see that Win 7 had a built in schedulable disc
defragmenter.
Today I installed Ashampoo WinOptimiser 2010 and looked at it's defrga
option.
Windows says my C: drive is 4% fragmented but Ashampoo says it's 36%
fragmented which sounds very high on a 2 month old PC.

Who do I believe??

Peter

It depends upon the definition of fragmented.

The definition I have seen on MS utilities is that it just looks at the
files to see if they are contiguous.

Other better utilities not only look at the files but also at the free disk
space and the type of file. For example the .exe files can be positioned at
the the start of the disk to improve access speeds and also move other files
toward the front of the disk (or back depending upon your settings) so that
the free space is also reasonable contiguous and there is less chance of new
files you create being fragmented. The better utilities will do this even
if MS Defrag says the file is already contiguous.