Need some deframentation help if possible

wolfman

albertross wrote:

on a modern drive, defrag won't make much difference..

Can you elaborate on that? Bit of a brief statement.

electron_3

May I just say that defragging my drive helps enormousely as I install and remove photographic progs for testing purposes and because my drive is larger than any previous drive Ive had 40gig (thats the biggest I need) I have found that the defrag enables me to clean up the the drive so that teh PC isnt looking for bits of info willy nilly after uninstalls, the problem with much bigger drives is that the info needed is dispersed over a much larger area, so a slower drive can result.

albertross_2

I'm not saying don't do it. If you had a full drive, and deleted a lot of stuff, then compacting it might make a small difference.

The main reason to do it in the old days, was that it minimised head movement (which was slow). On a modern drive, with larger capacities, and caching, the head doesn't need to move as much to pick up any one file. The physical disk size is the same as it always was, the head moves faster, so it is not as beneficial as it used to be.

wolfman

I can see your point in that sense. I guess it depends upon how volatile your drive is. I'd still recommend doing it, especially on a Windows partition.

I can definitely notice the difference on my storage drives. Especially on the partition I use to extract dvd's. I used to also have my game installs there (bf2) and the drive was slightly less response and I could also hear it having to work harder.

It's something that can only be good for the drive (or less work). The difference in performance will vary between pc's.

07311022

Just a quick update - I've defragged the pc and have now upgraded the PC with 1GB ram. Only ordered this from Crucial on Wednesday evening, and it arrived this morning.(So a big recommendation to them from me too!)

What a difference - only had 256 mb before - PC is now flying through screens! Done a lot for my confidence in tackling these techie issues, so thanks a lot guys!