defragging

castle96

does this only 'run' (is part of the set maintainence - "every weds at 1pm"), when the computer is turned on/in use ? or do I have to do it manually when I am actually using the computer

thanks

kwikbreaks

Although many will say differently I don't think there is any great benefit from bothering to defrag at all these days.

Mat_Lock

Defragging is useful if you have older drives and also a lot of data on the drives. It can speed up accessing files to a certain degree. You should never defrag an SSD!

You need the PC on for the defrag task to run, you don't need to do anything yourself to start it as it should be set to run at that specific time.

closed

just leave it to do it automatically, not that it will make any difference to the machines speed

esuhl

Defragging can be worthwhile on certain filesystems if you haven't done it for a while. Windows XP has to be manually defragmented (IIRC), but Windows Vista and 7 (and, I assume, 8) will automatically defragment your filesystem in the background so you don't need to do anything.

As far as the scheduling goes, if it's set to defrag every Wednesday at 1pm, it will be run at this time (if the PC is on), or at the next available opportunity.

castle96

You should never defrag an SSD!

what is SSD ?

nickcc

Solid state drive.

esuhl

castle96 wrote: »

You should never defrag an SSD!

what is SSD ?

In case you're interested...

A traditional hard drive is made of circular platters (disks) which store the data magnetically. They spin round and are read by a static head (a bit like a record player). In order to read a particular "bit" of data, the PC has to wait while the platter spins round and the relevant bit of data is under the head. Then it has to wait for the platter to spin round again to the next bit of data. Obviously, it saves a lot of time if the data are all adjacent to each other. Defragmenting the drive does this, which can improve performance.

A solid state drive (SSD) has no moving parts. Each "bit" of memory can be accessed directly, so it makes no difference to performance whether all the bits are next to each other or not. However, the reliability of an SSD degrades every time a bit of data is overwritten, so defragmenting will cause the drive to fail sooner.