This is how to defrag a PC and the reason why

John_the_Boy

Zanzibar, I use iObit smart defrag

http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html

aliEnRIK

Zanzibar wrote: »

Prove it to yourself - disable your Vista or 7 scheduled defrag for 6 months. Then report back on the performance of your system. Then defrag and compare again and you will have an idea of the difference.

I have (Vista AND xp). There was no discernable difference

Pikeyp

I'm more than happy with the built-in Win 7 defragger at default settings .. just let it do it's thing when it wants to!

Happy new year everybody!!

Zanzibar

aliEnRIK wrote: »

I have (Vista AND xp). There was no discernable difference

Good for you.

Scrilla

Zanzibar wrote: »

They also do not defrag 'on the fly' as a couple of people have posted. They make better use of available space but they don't defrag like that - see the link posted above.

They certainly do defragment on the fly, at least as far as Mac OS is concerned (see below) and it's was my understanding Windows OS and Linux does the same (on top of the scheduling).

Marty_J wrote: »

Apple say pretty much the same thing in their support document about defragmentation.

Thank you for the link. As quoted from the support article:
"Fragmentation was often caused by continually appending data to existing files, especially with resource forks. With faster hard drives and better caching, as well as the new application packaging format, many applications simply rewrite the entire file each time. Mac OS X 10.3 Panther can also automatically defragment such slow-growing files. This process is sometimes known as "Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering.""

Rewriting the file is to ensure files are contiguous, i.e. not fragmented. IIRC, Mac OS auto-defragments files under 20 MB. As per my previous post, defragmentation is necessary for some users, but not necessary for a typical user. I am almost certain Windows did the same, but the links provided by users in this thread seems to disprove that

(The Apple support document confuses me slightly to be honest. I thought Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering was something completely different, not 'auto defragmentation'. I thought it was the process by which the OS moves frequently accessed files to one section of the hard drive so such files can be accessed faster in sequence. Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering is definitely something Windows 7 does as well.)

aliEnRIK

Scrilla wrote: »

I am almost certain Windows did the same, but the links provided by users in this thread seems to disprove that

Windows Vista (And id assume windows 7) do defrag when the computers idle. but its defrag program is a tad poor as DEFRAGGLER does a far better job (For example). Ive switched mine off

XP doesnt defrag automatically by default

cliffski

Background:
I'm a computer games programmer.

I carried out a bunch of tests in my old job to see if defragging made a difference in loading a large game I worked on. It made a suprisngly big difference, in that the game would load 25% faster (or more).
It really depends what you are doing. If you surf the web and send email, then there probably isn't a lot of large file loading going on. If you play big modern games or do a lot of video editing, then the PC will likely be loading a lot of 100MB+ files, which can (depending how much you use your PC) end up scattered all over the place.

Reading contiguous data from a disk (a single chunk) is just way way faster than reading it from different spots on the disk. The nightmare scenario would scatter every cluster (normally 2-4k) of a 100MB file randomly accross the radius of a drive platter, meaning your drive head has to flicker accross every point of the disk to read the file, rather than just staying more or less motionless as the platter spins and the data is hoovered up.
Yes this takes milliseconds, or even nanoseconds, but when you load in a gigabyte of data, this adds up.

It's trendy these days to profess that defragging isn't needed any more. It really is, in certain circumstances. Another one si if (like me) you have a microsoft mail system and tens of thousands of emails, which the system likes to parse on loading the mail client. Thats well worth defragging

Saving_spree

Thanks dude.........

busenbust

and tens of thousands of emails

:shocked: Spam? Or Exchange Server as a dedicated solution :cool:

buglawton

I think defragging effectiveness becomes much more noticeable when the disk is over 85% full. It's your signal to either have a major clear out (Try Treesize Free http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml ) or get a bigger disk.