This is how to defrag a PC and the reason why

greenslime

good tip - only defrag if it is necessary. why defrag every night before you go to bed...seems a bit silly to me. plus when i defrag i notice very little difference in speed. i only do it because tune up recommends i do it.

busenbust

@super^^Lol, censored

John_Gray

greenslime wrote: »

i only do it because tune up recommends i do it.

Phew! That's all right, then! :rotfl:

thor

Won't a highly fragmented drive be a problem for disk intensive tasks such as encoding? If there are bits of an avi file all over the place then surely it will take longer for the disk head to reach them all?

BillScarab

thor wrote: »

Won't a highly fragmented drive be a problem for disk intensive tasks such as encoding? If there are bits of an avi file all over the place then surely it will take longer for the disk head to reach them all?

Yes it will but were talking about milliseconds. If an encoding job is going to take a couple of hours a fragmented disc might add a few seconds to the job.

Doing a defrag may help and won't do any harm but for most people, most of the time, it won't make a noticable difference.

superscaper

thor wrote: »

Won't a highly fragmented drive be a problem for disk intensive tasks such as encoding? If there are bits of an avi file all over the place then surely it will take longer for the disk head to reach them all?

It's not that it won't help in some circumstances, it will. The improvements may be noticeable but they won't be vast. And with Windows Vista and 7 defragmenting is done as you work anyway automatically by default so there's no point specifically running a defragmenting tool. And it only applies to magnetic based hard drives. Solid state drives don't defragment anyway and running defragmenting tools does nothing except use up write cycles.

Zanzibar

Yes, defragmenting is a good idea - which is why its now automatically scheduled to run every week in Vista and Windows 7. Note that if solid-state media is detected, Windows 7 disables defragmentation on that disk as it can shorten the life of this type of media.

A well fragmented drive can bring the speed of a computer in disk intensive tasks down considerably. How frequently should you defrag XP? - depends on how you use your PC, the types of program you use etc etc. but I'd say monthly is a good idea.

If you run the defrag program it will give you a basic analysis and let you know the percentage of fragmented files.

I see quite a few badly fragmented XP PCs that have never been defragged in their life and as its a run-it-and-leave-it operation its a no brainer to let it run it for an hour or two that it takes.

exup

on older systems defragging could improve performance of a PC with respect to gaming - about every couple of months or so - and the difference in performance would be clear. Although this would also be couple with clearing out all the junk files that may have built up.
Modern PC and operating systems it doesnt seem to have much of an effect - although on my older gaming PC (2004) running on XP pro with some of the old games - it doesnt seem to have caused problems with the hard drives. its still on its original maxtor 40gig drive (and seagate 160G secondary)

Scrilla

The majority of typical computer users will almost definitely not see any performance difference after defragging. As has been said, the likes of Windows and Mac OS' will defragment on-the-fly but only to an extent.

An example which was mentioned of where defragmentation is useful is for video encoding. Also as mentioned, defragmentation will only shave milliseconds off hours of encoding time. In the case of video work, defragmentation will do wonders for anyone who is sequencing and editing. Working with multiple media sources and render files, defragmentation occurs a lot. If dedicated hardware is not used, then this will cause major system slowdowns such as when scrubbing and will make it difficult to edit efficiently.

Defragmentation has it's uses. I personally defragment every 2-3 months and this gives me perceivably improved startup times for systems, applications as well as improved file opening times. I wouldn't do it more often than 2-3 months though. If all you do is email, surf the net, write documents, play games, then defragmentation will do virtually nothing for you because your OS will be able to cope with it's own on-the-fly defragmentation routines. If you do media editing, work with a large number of files (whether it be media, office documents, compressed files) and/or transfer a lot of files frequently (as well as a lot of other unmentioned tasks), then defragmentation on a regular basis may help your system become more responsive. If your system is a couple of years old or more, you may also benefit.

[Deleted User]

Larger Hard Drives/faster CPUs with higher amounts of cache and better designed software have pretty much negated any performance benefits that defragmenting a disk may have given years ago.