Disk Defragmenter

[Digerati]

That's not exactly what I said though I might not have been very clear. I said disk space is cheap and the best preventative measure to prevent disk performance problems due to fragmentation is to have lots of free disk space. Fragmentation is inevitable, but does NOT automatically suggest a problem. With plenty of free disk space, fragmentation will not become excessive, and therefore should not impact performance.

I've always thought that moveing/adding/deleting files is what causes the largest degree of file fragmentation are you of this opinion or do you feel the fragmentation is soley caused by low disk space.

You are right, moving/adding/deleting does contribute to fragmentation. But if there is lots of free disk space, the newly saved file should be intact, but now there may be a hole where it used to be. Another file may be saved in that hole, or holes, then next time, intact.

But again, that does not mean it will result in performance issues - at least not right away. And not I did not say defragging was not necessary. I am saying you don't need a fancy defragger that takes up more disk space.

I also did not say defragging does not improve performance. I can, if the drive is heavily fragmented.

And by plenty of free space, I don't necessarily mean by percentage. 45% free on a small drive can still result in a small amount free. Now if you have a 1Tb drive with 450Gb free and fragmentation keeps getting so bad it impacts performance, then I will need to revisit my comments.

If you are constantly installing new programs, uninstalling old programs, installing new programs, you will likely have more fragmented files. But most people are not constantly adding new programs and may go for months with nothing but updates, cookies, and temporary Internet files being saved.

 

[Mychael]

That clarifies it. In MY case it's 45% free of 250gig. So I guess a reasonable bit of room to play with.

 

[Kougar]

The only thing I can add is that the Windows 7 Defrag program, despite reports to the contrary, let users defragment SSDs. It won't automatically defrag them like it will with hard drives, but it doesn't warn the user against doing so if they start the Disk Defragmentation program. Defragging an SSD is a very, very bad idea and should never be done.

"Realize the whole reason they started using a recovery partition in the first place is because they were too cheap to include an actual OS disk + their driver/programs disk and instead they convince you to buy bigger HDs because 500GB ends up only being 425GB when they finish. "

I like that TM. I am very unpopular in a couple of our local shops for advising their customers to complain and ask for DVD's.

Yeah, pretty much exactly why. Of course some OEM's now have a policy to charge users a fee if they want (or end up needing) physical recovery discs... it's better to use the system reserve recovery software to make the actual recovery discs where possible.

 

[davehc]

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https://www.w7forums.com/disk-defragmenter-t12013.html#post97126



"Yeah, pretty much exactly why. Of course some OEM's now have a policy to charge users a fee if they want (or end up needing) physical recovery discs... it's better to use the system reserve recovery software to make the actual recovery discs where possible. "

I was going to break into print at length, further on this, but I took the hint in Nibs last post that we were going off thread! I may pop over to the open forum and raise some views - lol.